App That Allows Deaf People to Verbally Communicate Wins Imagine Cup
From: Computerworld Australia - 07/11/2012
By: Stephanie McDonald 

First place in the 2012 Imagine Cup went to a Ukrainian university team that
developed an application that enables deaf people to verbally communicate
using sensory gloves and a smartphone. The sensory gloves include flex
sensors that capture finger movements, and this data is transmitted to a
microcontroller that normalizes the data and then sends it to a smartphone.
The Enable Talk app is designed to correlate hand movement patterns with
sounds, which would enable users to communicate with people who do not know
sign language. More than 350 students from 75 countries participated in the
competition covering software design, game design, and six other categories.
A Japanese team took second place for developing a power-saving system that
enables light-emitting diode lamps to communicate with each other and dim
automatically if a room has more light than is needed. A Portuguese team
finished third with a robotic cart designed to improve the mobility of people
with special needs by using motors and sensors powered by Kinect. One
finalist in the software design category, a team from New Zealand, developed
an app that uses artificial intelligence to aid blind people. 

Rad the entire article at:
http://www.computerworld.com.au:80/article/430229/app_allows_deaf_people_verbally_communicate_wins_imagine_cup/

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EnableTalk Translates Sign Language Into Speech, Gives New Meaning to
  'Talking with Your Hands' 
From: Geektech - 07/15/2012
By: Cassandra Khaw

EnableTalk, QuadSquad's award-winning invention, was built on the spine of a
simple yet important question: How do you break down the communication
barrier between the deaf and the rest of the world? With black leather
gloves, circuitry, and intelligent software, obviously. 

The EnableTalk glove comes outfitted with more than a dozen flex-sensors and
built-in accelerometers capable of registering both the timing and the
direction of the operator's hand movements. A controller on the globe can
analyze and interpret those signals before relaying them via Bluetooth to a
text-to-speech engine that translates them into spoken speech.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/259273/enabletalk_translates_sign_language_into_speech_gives_new_meaning_to_talking_with_your_hands.html#tk.nl_dnx_h_crawl

Links:
EnableTalk
http://www.enabletalk.com/

Glove Turns Sign Language into Spoken Letters, Opens Up Communication
http://www.pcworld.com/article/255628/glove_turns_sign_language_into_spoken_letters_opens_up_communication.html