Every day deaf people struggle with the huge communication barrier. To help them we created app that recognizes sign language gestures

The background of the problem:

Currently, there are around 70 million deaf and deaf-mute people, as many as 900,000 of them live in Poland. Every day these people struggle with the communication barrier that exists between them and those who can hear. The reason for this barrier is, the fact that it is quite common for people born with an auditory canal disorder to be unable to speak. The gestures defined in sign language are used to express every single letter of the alphabet, as well as entire words or expressions. Sign language is known by almost every deaf person, so they can easily communicate with each other. However, the situation becomes even more complicated when they need to make contact with a hearing person, as sign language is not a common skill among the hearing people.

Nowadays, there are many types of devices and applications available on the market for deaf people. These can improve the quality of a deaf person’s everyday life such as shopping, dealing with various issues at work, banks or doctors' offices. For instance, Raspberry Pi -  a small, credit card-sized microcomputer. Looking at its popularity, low price and fact that is developed as open source project, Raspberry Pi seems to be a great solution that can be used to support people with disabilities.

Our application is designed to help deaf people communicate with people who are not familiar with sign language. This project will show the benefits of using the technology available to everyone, such as Raspberry Pi and also let deaf people communicate without a translator.

For people with disabilities, it could be a practical assistance in everyday life.

An additional motivation to create such program was fact, that Paulina's mother works as a sign language interpreter and knows the problems of deaf people.

The solution:

An application which recognizes sign language gestures using the Raspberry Pi microcomputer, image processing technology, and machine learning in Python with the OpenCV library.

Click here to view: website and download app