Tag: Deaf

Last year we featured Captioning on Glass, an application that uses Google Glass and an Android device to translate speech to text in real time. Now a group of teenagers claim they can provide us with a device that has the same capabilities.

Earlier this year we saw a project where Google Glass was used to project an interpreter for deaf students. A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with a more immediate solution for people that are hard of hearing.

We Love Fine and writer Matt Fraction’s H Signs t-shirt is based on Hawkeye #19. That issue of Fraction’s and David Aja’s comic book series has been lauded for its portrayal of daily life for deaf people.

We’ve seen Google Glass used to help blind people. Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) on the other hand are using Glass as well as other head-mounted displays to help deaf students learn. They call their project Signglasses.

While there’s plenty of hype going on about smartwatches these days, most of the watches out there solve fairly superfluous problems – like seeing that you have a phone call because you’re too lazy to get the phone out of your pocket.

A few months ago we saw a concept for a camera-based device that is meant to recognize sign language and translate it into spoken words. A Ukrainian-based team has something better: a working prototype of a smart glove with the exact same capability.

Not that hearing aids are unsightly, but some people who use them actually find how they look pretty annoying. But it’s better to have them than not be able to hear what people are saying around you, right?

If you’re have difficulty hearing or are deaf, going to the movies can be a challenge unless you manage to find a showing or a theater with special projected captions. Thanks to a new Sony technology, you can now view captions on any showing of a digitally-projected film, without requiring that everyone watch the captions.

A group of students from the engineering technology and industrial design programs of the University of Houston have come up with a concept for a device that can read sign language and translate it into audible words, as well as translate spoken word into sign language.

Microsoft’s Xbox 360 add-on has been a hit not just with gamers but with modders and hackers as well. While only a few of its launch games are truly unique and imaginative – Dance Central and Kinectimals come to mind – more and more people are discovering a variety of non-gaming related purposes for Kinect, from rendering a person invisible to controlling drones.

Developed by Kobe-based fire extinguisher company Air Water Safety Service and Seems, a bioventure in Tokyo, this unusual fire alarm is specially designed to wake up or warn hearing impaired people by releasing wasabi stench instead of sounding an alarm.