Hand-Gesture Computing for the Hearing and Speech Impaired

data glove with a wireless interface provides convenient and natural human– computer interaction for people with speech or hearing impairments. H umans communicate with each other using speech, hand ges-tures, facial expressions, and sign language. It seems natural to use the same type of interactions when communicating with computers. This be-comes all the more important for humans challenged with hearing and speech impair-ments. For example, several applications in education and entertainment—such as inter-active learning modules, lecture presentations, and 3D games—have speech input-and-output capabilities. Speech- and hearing-impaired humans require real-time sign language ges-ture recognition and generation to use these applications. Figure 1 illustrates our system for hand-gesture-based human–computer interactions. In our approach, data gloves, such as the Immersion CyberGlove (se