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WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY

Do deaf communities actually want sign language gloves?

Nature Electronics volume 3, pages 512–513 (2020)Cite this article

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The development of recognition and translation technology for signed language requires an interdisciplinary approach that begins with deaf contributors.

Automatic speech recognition is useful but unremarkable given how widespread the technology is in households, schools, workplaces, vehicles, and public spaces. Naturally, this leads to a desire to extend such technology to automatic sign recognition to capture and translate physically produced expressions of signed languages into speech. Such translation could be a great aid to cross-language communication between a signer and a speaker in which the signer can sign a few phrases that are then translated into equivalent expressions in spoken language for the speaker, and vice versa. Such a goal was established in 1983 with the first work on sign language electronic gloves1,2. But the goal is still out of reach for three key reasons: the lack of an appropriate linguistic framework, the lack of appropriate applications of wearable automatic sign recognition technologies, and the lack of interdisciplinary collaboration.

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Fig. 1: Sign language glove technology.

References

  1. Bragg, D. et al. In Proc. 21st Int. ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility 16–31 (2019).

  2. Erard, M. Why sign-language gloves don’t help deaf people. The Atlantic (9 November 2017).

  3. Fenlon, J. & Wilkinson, E. Sign languages in the world. In Sociolinguistics and Deaf Communities (eds. Lucas, C. & Schembri, A. C.) 5–28 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).

  4. Zhou, Z. et al. Nat. Electron. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0428-6 (2020).

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  1. Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, United States

    Joseph Hill

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  1. Joseph Hill
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Correspondence to Joseph Hill.

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Hill, J. Do deaf communities actually want sign language gloves?. Nat Electron 3, 512–513 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0451-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-0451-7

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