ENABLING TALK

By,Xavier Prathap W, III BScSt. Claret College.

Introduction• Now-a-days to lead our life we had to run with our fast materialistic

world.

• To express our thoughts, we communicate with different people in different languages and in different ways.

• But, it is extremely difficult for the dumb, blind and people who are affected by paralysis to express their ideas in speech or text.

• Hence, there is a need to develop a platform for those people who are physically challenged.

• Hence, Vibration Sensors and Silent Speech Interfaces are developed that can be either fixed on the hands or face.

IntroductionSuch an Electronic device shall help,

• paralysis affected people to communicate by wearing a glove made up of flex sensors that can convey their ideas.

• dumb people by pressing the keypad in the device to express their basic needs with the text-to-speech IC.

• When the blind people speak, speech-to-text module converts it and viewed in a display.

• No need for “Human Interpreter” for blind people, to write.

• A team of Ukrainian researchers called QuadSquad is trying to bring down the barrier. They’ve designed a system called EnableTalk.

• It includes a glove that can sense the movements of the wearer’s hands and fingers and translate the signs into spoken word

Gloves Turn Sign language to Speech

• Each glove is lined with more than a dozen flex .

• Built-in accelerometers can tell when the hand gestures, and in which direction.

• On the back of the hand lies a controller, the heart of the system that analyzes all these incoming signals and transmits them via Bluetooth to a mobile device.

• A lithium-ion battery charged via USB powers the device.

• Finally a software translates the signals into an audio signal, and spoken words emerge.

Gloves Turn Sign language to Speech

Flex sensors The people who are affected by the Paralysis wear

gloves which are designed with flex sensors. Each flex sensor denotes a word. When a finger is moved, it produces the voice of

that word. This takes place by placing a Bluetooth

transmitter and receiver.

Flex sensors The flex sensors are based on resistive carbon element technology.

They are an analog resistor which works as variable voltage drivers.

The carbon resistive element is placed inside the flex sensors as a thin

flexible substrate. Depending upon the amount of bend in the sensors, it can change its electrical resistance value.

The flex sensors are in the form of a thin strip from 1-5 inches long. It can be uni-directed or bi-directed. They vary in their values as 1-20 kΩ; 50-200 kΩ,

Images of flex sensors

Silent speech1. Inner speech: mental simulation of speech.

2. Subvocal invisible speech : when a person silently reads or recites to him/herself, ensors under a person’s chin.

3. Subvocal visible speech : one wanted to be seen but not heard, ultrasound motion of the tongue Movement captured.

4. Non-audible murmur (NAM): softly whispered, subvocal invisible speech with air emission.

5. Whispered speech: similar to NAM but heard more clearly.

Silent speech interfaces (SSI)

Multimodal signals during the speech production process

The speech production process can be regarded as producing a set of coherent multimodal signals, such as the electrical cerebral signals, the myoelectrical signals observable from the muscles, the movements of the orofacial articulators that are visible or not, or acoustic signals

Electro-encephalographic (EEG) sensors

Brain areas are activated in the production of speech.

To exploit the electromagnetic waves created by these cerebral activities, noninvasive electroencephalography or EEG devices are frequently used as a brain-to computer interface (BCI)

Surface Electromyography (sEMG)

The surface Electromyography (sEMG) method measures muscular electric potential with a set of electrodes attached to the skin where the articulatory muscles underlie.

Tongue displays Apart from very sophisticated medical imaging techniques such as

cineradiography or real-time MRI that provide complete tongue displays, several other techniques such as ElectroMagnetic Articulography (EMA) or ultrasound (US) imaging provide partial information of the inner organs in motion.

This device is a boon for the dumb people, physically handicapped people and for the blind people.

This single device resolves the maximum problems faced by those people. Any one of those people can use this device and they can reveal their basic thoughts with other people.

By using this device, the people with disabilities can lead their life in an enjoyable way as all other people in the world.

Further improvements have to be done to reduce cost of production and for ease of use.

Conclusion

PHd Thesis , By Viet Anh Tran.

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/rethinking-healthcare/gloves-turn-sign-language-into-speech/9489

http://scialert.net/abstract/index.php?doi=jai.2013.75.81

Poster presented in Fifth Science Conclave, IIIT, Allahabad.

References:

Thank You

By,Xavier Prathap W, III BScSt. Claret College.