Wearable ring translates sign language into text | Popular Science
American Sign Language (ASL) has long enabled real-time conversations for English-speaking people who are deaf and hard-of-hearing. But discussions often face significant lags when one or more conversants aren’t fluent in the language system. But by combining deep learning artificial intelligence and micro-sonar technologies, researchers at Cornell University are developing a new wearable to help overcome the communication barriers. With further refinement, SpellRing may one day facilitate entire conversations regardless of your ASL comprehension skills.
ASL’s earliest iterations developed in the early 18th century at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Today, around 400,000 people in the US utilize modern ASL, including a large number of children of deaf adults (CODA). Like any language, ASL often takes years of education and practice to reach fluency. Given that the majority of Americans don’t regularly occupy spaces requiring it, however, the language still remains mostly relegated to populations that are deaf and hard-of-hearing. In the meantime, technological innovations haven’t caught up with them.
“Many other technologies that recognize fingerspelling in ASL have not been adopted by the deaf and hard-of-hearing community because the hardware is bulky and impractical,” Hyunchul Lim, a Cornell information science doctoral student, said in a university profile on March 17. “We sought to develop a single ring to capture all of the subtle and complex finger movement in ASL.”
