BrightSign Glove is an assistive technology that facilitates communication for individuals who are non-verbal.

Experts at the Etisalat stand at Gitex Technology Week 2019, revealed that they had created a glove that can learn to understand sign language through machine learning technology and communicate with people.

Founded by Hadeel Ayoub, an entrepreneur from Saudi Arabia, BrightSign Glove is an assistive technology that facilitates communication for individuals who are non-verbal. It is a wireless glove containing a number of motion and position sensors, which feedback to a smartphone app that uses machine learning. It can be personalised for custom hand gestures, and output speech in any language, giving users complete control over sign language libraries and their verbal communication.

“We don’t ship any language on the glove, because there are around a hundred different types of sign language,” said Ed Hill, CEO of BrightSign Glove. “In addition, the way that everyone speaks sign language with their hands is also different. You also have to take into account the shape and size of their hands. As a result, the only way to get the high accuracy levels that we need to communicate is if you train the glove yourselves.

“Traditional machine learning systems require a large amount of training data, but we only require you to train the sign a couple of times. You show the computer the sign, one or two times, and maybe three times at most if it is a difficult sign, and it will remember it.”

The BrightSign Glove uses Bluetooth to connect to a companion app, which has speech recognition software in it. The app will launch on both iOS and Android when it goes public with the glove. It is able to output the translated sign language in a range of voices, selectable by the user, in any language.

“We are currently taking pre-orders and shipping them to our partners,” Hill said.

“In terms of a full commercial launch to the general public, we are aiming to be ready for that by the new year.”