Braille Glove - A communication and translation device for the deaf - Blind

Hello everyone, we are a team of students from BITS Pilani Goa Campus, and in this video we've shown a working prototype of our project - Braille Glove - a communication and translation device for the deafblind. There are around 300,000 deafblind individuals in India and many more in the world. And most of them are excluded from a proper form of communication. They may face social isolation and other developmental and educational problems. There is a considerable amount of dependency upon interpreters, and hence they face a communication gap with the outside world. Typically, people affected have the opportunity to use Braille as a medium for interaction. The system we propose aims to bridge this communication gap. It is an interface which acts as a real-time translator between English text and Braille. This device is a smart glove which can be used to communicate with a cellphone or a PC via Bluetooth. This proof-of-concept device is designed to be worn on the left hand, with the input side as the palmar side, and the output side as the dorsal side. The advantages of our device are that it's very portable, less obstructive, cost-effective and very easy to use. Also, it uses Braille as a communication language, which is widely known across the world. It acts as a simultaneous translator and makes interaction with people without the knowledge of Braille also possible. This device could have the potential to empower people affected by deafblindness by enhancing their independence. The first function of our device is implemented using 6 vibrational motors representing the Braille alphabet. These motors rotate according to the characters sent via Bluetooth. To implement the second function of our device, we've used a double sided PCB as touch sensor and 6 touch sensors are aligned on the palmar side of the glove. As you can see the specific touch sensors are touched, and then the push-button is pressed in order to record the character which is being sent. This character is further interpreted and translated and then transmitted via Bluetooth to the Android phone. In order to realize whether the specific touch sensor has been pressed, we've used a feedback mechanism where motor number 4 rotates whenever a touch is sensed. We've used sensor number 6 as our space character. Let us try typing a word now. As you can see the word 'monday' is being printed. So this is how we've implemented the proof-of-concept design of our Braille Glove. Now here in this demonstration we used laptop as a power source, but our final device can be powered using 9 volt battery. For that, we've used LM317 for voltage regulation and op-amp IC's as buffers for touch sensors. We have implemented the circuit by etching an 8 by 8 cm copper plate and then soldering it. This board can now be used along with the microcontroller and Bluetooth module, and is sufficient for the device to function properly. Although we've shown motors on a separate board, the final wearable glove will have coin-type vibration motors embedded on the dorsal side of the glove. And hence this device would be very portable and easy to work with, and surely be very very helpful to aid communication with deaf-blind people. We've also designed an Android app for this purpose. The app runs in the background of the glove user's phone. Any message entered by the user on the glove is accepted via Bluetooth and the text message is sent to a specific cellphone number specified in the message itself. For example, in the demonstration here, the text message "Hi there!" is sent to the cellphone number specified after the word "send". This can help the deaf-blind users stay in touch with their loved ones, wherever they are.