CHENNAI: The Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) has designed a gesture-to-speech device which would act as an independent mode of communication for people with disabilities like cerebral palsy.
Called iGest (Intelligent Gesture Recognition Device), it captures movement, for example, rotation of wrist, and sends the information to a mobile phone connected via bluetooth, and one of the sentences in the library associated with the movement is voiced out.
According to an official release by the institute, this device has recently won the prestigious Nina Saxena Excellence in Technology Award. The device,designed as a communicative aid for people with motor impairments, belongs to ‘Alternate and Augmentative Communication’ model of devices.
Using an in-built combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes, the movements were captured and the phone connected to this device runs a motion tracking software to identify the captured movement.
Designers said that iGest can thus be used both to “speak” as desired by the individual or be used by an occupational therapist to train a particular movement.
The award was presented to the team comprising D Jayavel, Nitin Chandrachoodan and Anil Prabhakar from IIT-Madras and T Pradeep from Enability Foundation, a non-profit company incubated by IIT-M.