Final Project Introduction
The inclusion of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals in both everyday environments and the workplace is extremely important to me. Many members of this community possess strong creative and intellectual abilities and can significantly contribute to society when proper communication tools are available.
Although sign language already exists as a well-established communication system, many people—including myself—do not know how to use it fluently. In my local community, I have a friend and an acquaintance who belong to this group, and communication with them is often limited and sometimes confusing.
For this reason, I decided to develop a wearable assistive device in the form of a glove-based exoskeleton. The goal is to allow me to translate finger movements into predefined words and simple phrases, enabling more direct communication without relying on sign language knowledge.
The system will be designed primarily for personal use, focusing on common expressions such as “HELLO”, “OK”, and “NO”. While generating long sentences is more complex, the aim is to eventually achieve simple phrases such as “HELLO, HOW ARE YOU?” as an initial milestone.
Project Scope
The objective of this project is to translate hand and finger movements into digital outputs representing words or short phrases using a wearable glove system.
The device will not provide full real-time language translation, but instead focus on predefined gestures mapped to common expressions. This project will serve as a foundation for future improvements beyond Fab Academy, where additional functionality and accuracy can be implemented.
A preliminary sketch of the proposed design is shown below.
