Communication plays an important role in everyday life. We as human beings tend to communicate our needs to one another. As per the reports given by WHO back in 2021, 5% of the world population is suffering from hearing loss which is approximately 430+million people on this planet who are deaf. This can have devastating consequences for their physical and mental health, education, and employment prospects.

Problem Statement: Difficulty in communication between a deaf person and a person who can hear/speak.

During my research while talking to people who use sign language as a tool for communication, they find it difficult to translate or convey a message to the opposite person who can speak. This is because there is a constant need of human translator for the person to communicate which is quite expensive and finding one is very difficult. As of the speaking public, learning sign language could really be a challenging task considering the timeline to learn the language and personal interest. My recent visit to a Deaf Institute gave me a proper insight and idea on what exactly is the deaf person looking for and I have found a perfect solution for a wearable translator and this will enable the person to communicate effectively with every person.

Objectives:

1. To bridge the communication barrier.
2. To make a device that enables communication and opportunities for the deaf.

The goal is to make a personal translator which is easy to use, handy and is affordable by an average person. Since there are no hardware based translators out there, this product will be the first and one of a kind. This device is build with a IR camera setup that does the gesture tracking and hand movement recognition with the help of QCS603 processor. Every hand sign is recorded, labelled and auto trained with ML on the cloud to produce accuracy. We are expecting the device to provide 94% accuracy results so far. This device also has a speaker, mic and display so that it will translate the gesture to speech from the user via speaker and speech to text from the opposite person via microphone, thus enabling two way communication. In the back end we will be having an application which will handle the database for the translator for training the module with the custom sign language words. This product is expected to be in the size of an action camera so that it can be carried and operated easily with no effort.

Conclusion:
This product stands for a greater cause. Currently I am facing challenges in prototyping but I believe once my designs are live, it has a greater potential to create an impact on so many lives across globe, enabling opportunities for the deaf with two way communication enabled.

Deaf and Mute are not Disabled, they are just Differently Abled.