Glove That Helps Deaf-Blind People Communicate

Venkat Rao

11 years ago

Image Source: The Atlantic

Tom Beiling, a 32 year old doctoral candidate in Berlin, has come up with a glove that just might revolutionize the way deaf-blind people communicate, at least in the form of texting.

With the intention of making communication easier between people who cannot see and hear, Tom has developed a glove that translates texts into pulses (haptic feedback). The glove consists of a set of pressure sensors, and with the help of a bluetooth device, connects to an iPhone app. The glove uses the Lorm alphabet (which places letters at different parts of the hand (see image)), and a pressure sensor is placed at the locations that are meant for letters (for example, fingertips are meant for vowels).

When someone needs to send text, the user just pushes the sensors meant for the alphabets that comprise of the words that they are wanting to send, and the haptic information from the tapping is converted to digital text and sent to the iphone app that sends out the message to the intended recipient. When the recipient receives the text, the motors on their glove vibrate and translate the words into vibrations, and they feel the vibrations on the pressure sensors. The vibrations essentially spell the words out.

One advantage of using this glove to communicate is that you don’t have to know Lorm alphabet to communicate with someone who is deaf-blind – the app converts digital text to Lorm alphabet for them. Till now, one had to know Lorm alphabet in order to communicate with people with deafblindness.

The glove is still a prototype. Beiling’s next prototype would probably be made out of material that is thinner than the one used for the current prototype.

Source: The Atlantic

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