Health and Wellness - smart glove to tackle hearing loss is a bright sign
- Summary:
- Cath Everett talks to BrightSign founder Hadeel Ayoub about her smart sign language glove.
An estimated 466 million people around the world, or 5% of the global population, have disabling levels of hearing loss, 34 million of whom are children.
Such hearing loss can be the result of everything from genetic causes to complications at birth, chronic ear infections or ageing, but one of the key effects is that it reduces an individual’s ability to communicate with others. This situation can lead to feelings of loneliness, isolation and frustration.
In economic terms, meanwhile, the World Health Organization estimates that unaddressed hearing loss costs the global economy a vast $750 billion. Such costs include healthcare (excluding hearing devices), educational support, loss of productivity and other societal impacts.
But while the global production of hearing aids meets less than 10% of global need - a figure that drops to more like 3% in the developing world - the figure is even worse for other forms of assistive technology. According to Hadeel Ayoub, founder and chief executive of BrightSign, a mere 2% of people that use sign language have access to such offerings - although her aim is to make it more like 3% within three years of launching her smart sign language glove.
The launch itself is scheduled to take place at the end of this year, once Ayoub has completed her PhD in human-computer interaction at Goldsmiths College at the University of London and received the necessary funding to manufacture her working prototypes. While her first call for funding was issued in May, the prototypes are due to undergo their last usability test this summer.
As to how the smart glove actually works though, users simply put it on, turn it on and start to sign as they have always done. This signing activity is picked up by electronic sensors and verbalised by a microphone in the glove, although there are options to change the kind of voice employed and the language used. Everything that other people say also appears as text on a screen so that users can converse with them fluently. Ayoub says:
My vision is that the smart glove will become part of everyday life for people – something they can’t leave home without. It helps them to interact with the world rather than having to have someone interpret it for them. I want to give people a voice and more control over their communications on a daily basis.
Flexible and cost-effective
But one of the key things that differentiates BrightSign from other offerings on the market, Ayoub believes, is the ability to customise it for individuals who do not use standard sign languages such as autistic adults and children. Another aim is also to make it much cheaper than rival products already out there on the market.
While there will be an ongoing minimum monthly charge for upgrades, Ayoub says the cheapest rival offering is around £2,000. Her goal, on the other hand, is to price the smart glove in the “hundreds not thousands” – although the actual fee will depend on the funding she receives and whether she can afford to go for mass-levels of production in China or for smaller amounts of manufacturing in the UK.
Interestingly though, Ayoub says that having no access to funding while undertaking her PhD actually worked to her advantage in pricing terms:
Having no access to funding meant I had to wait to gain access to the necessary hardware and software, but it also meant that I developed cheap prototypes to keep costs down, which made it more affordable. So it all worked out in the end.
Her initial objective is to make the smart glove available to 1,500 schools across the UK on a free-of-charge based on government funding to support non-verbal children - and eventually to even replace their costly human teaching assistants. Ayoub says she is already working with schools now in order to monitor how the glove can help improve children’s learning and behaviour.
But she also intends to sell it into sites such as universities and airports, which already have different forms of assisted technology available – and all this from a chance opportunity. Ayoub explains:
BrightSign didn’t start out as a translator for sign language – it was originally an interactive art installation, but I removed the keyboard and mouse as I didn’t want the performers being limited by something physical. So I created a glove.
But I was then selected as part of Goldsmith’s team to prepare for an IBM hackathon in artificial intelligence for social care and, as I already knew sign language, it was an obvious choice. We went up against MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Georgia Tech (The Georgia Institute of Technology) and won the grand prize, and then received emails from parents and teachers asking us when it would be on the market. I was just writing my PhD proposal at the time and so changed direction and have now been developing it for three years. So it was all by chance really.
My take
Innovation can come from many quarters and inspiration may strike at any time, following a chance conversation or encounter. But the common thread through all of the Health and Wellness exemplars we've highlighted this week is applying tech in new ways to improve people’s lives, in the process enabling them to deal with the difficulties they face just that little bit better.