Sign language into speech and more: Unleashing potentials of the Filipino youth

How about combining this innovation with another technology?

by Joseph Osal / August 11, 2021

As of 2018, there are more than 200,000 deaf Filipinos accounted for. Similar to other persons with disabilities (PWDs), they are no stranger to discrimination and violence. A group of students are on a mission to help the Deaf Mute Community especially in creating a brighter future for them. Driven to help uplift this community, these students are developing a project that will hopefully impact this community.

Fifth year Electrical Engineering students Francis De Guzman, Rency De La Cruz, Klenn Alcibor, Joana Jimenez and Andrea Moran from Camarines Sur have been making their rounds on social media because of the special gloves they invented.

What’s so special about these gloves? They are actually capable of translating Filipino sign language into speech, something their team opted to pursue for their thesis project. They built a prototype from an ordinary pair of motorcycle gloves and provided ten censors in each five fingers and enabled through a nine volt battery. 

The group initially posted a trainable vlog on social media to celebrate the completion of their thesis defense. In the video, team leader Francis presented how the project worked. He performed Filipino sign language that said, “Hello, we are electrical engineering students of CSPC (Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges) and we created these gloves that interpret Filipino sign language into speech.”

Since then, it caught the attention of netizens and it was not long before it became viral. The post got millions of views and thousands of likes. It was also shared across different platforms and has been reposted by many popular online news pages.

While they consider this a big achievement, the students reflected on their experiences and shared that it was a challenging project to work on. Apart from having slow internet connection for their research, it was also difficult for them to find electronic chips and access to other equipment to build their invention. Moreover, another challenge they encountered was the positioning of the censors, “when it is being used, the rhythm changes,” Rency added in his interview.

CSPC has also expressed in the same interview that it was willing to support these students if they plan on continuing this project.

In another part of the world, a neuroscientist from Stanford University in California named David Eagleman invented wristbands that create new senses for humans that enable the deaf to hear sounds.

David shared that the inner ear captures sound from the world and it breaks it into frequencies and ships that off to the brain. So, he uses this method the same as he built a technology that captures sounds and information through the skin and ships to the brain. The wristband captures all the sound from the environment and translates it into a vibration. Through these sounds became a sense of touch and it can be used by deaf people to sense the world around them.

The mention of these innovations are not necessarily to compare them with each other. Instead, this raises the value of opening more discussions that scientists and inventors should explore to innovate and recreate technologies that will truly benefit society.

The possibilities are endless for these Filipino youth, and hopefully they get the support and resources they need to make their invention successful. It only goes to show that everyone has a chance for betterment by unleashing their potential, which can even make history on behalf of the Philippines on the global stage.

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