By Candace Stuart
Small Times Senior Writer
June 20, 2001 — It started with a gesture – actually, a flurry of gestures as the interpreter signed messages to a hungry crowd at the ordering station of a fast food restaurant. For the teen-age observer, it was a revelation about the daily difficulties people with hearing impairments endure.
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| Ryan Randall Patterson’s Sign Translator earned him a $50,000 Intel Young Scientist Scholarship, a trip to Sweden and $5,000 for the best engineering project. |
Within 10 months, Patterson had a working model of his Sign Translator, plus scholarships and prizes totaling $55,000 and an invitation to December’s Nobel Prize ceremonies. He was one of three students to win a $50,000 Intel Young Scientist Scholarship, one of two to earn the free trip to Sweden and the only student to nab those two honors plus the $5,000 prize for the best engineering project at the competition.
Patterson, who lives in Grand Junction, Colo., and is now 17, competed on May 11 with 1,200 students from 38 countries at the fair in San Jose, Calif.
“I realized you can’t be independent if you can’t speak,” Patterson said of the incident that inspired the project.
He has filed for a proprietary patent for the translator – a golf glove fitted with 10 tiny sensors, a microprocessor, a wireless transmitter and handheld electronic display – and is looking for a business partner to manufacture it.
Patterson is not the only student to use small tech to assist the deaf community. A team of students at the University of California, Berkeley, incorporated MEMS accelerometers into a glove that translates gestures into letters. Their goal was to create a prototype device that later will be scaled to go with a millimeter-square “smart dust” computer.
Six accelerometers placed on the glove’s fingers and back measure movement. Using a microcontroller and wireless link, the glove feeds data into a desktop computer. The Berkeley students developed software that recognizes gestures for 26 letters, a space bar and delete. Limitations with the MEMS accelerometers, particularly their inability to follow rotations, prevented them from mimicking American Sign Language, though.
“We wanted to show that the accelerometers could be used in something that is helpful,” said Kristofer Pister, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center. Pister oversees the project, which is part of his effort to build a computer so small it could be attached to a fingernail.
“Your keyboard and mouse would all be there,” Pister said. His work is funded by the Department of Defense, which could use the technology to survey hostile territories or search for weapons.
Patterson’s Sign Translator can handle linear and rotational movement. He put 10 sensors originally developed for virtual reality gloves into a golf glove and connected them to a circuit board. The sensors contain conductive carbon-coated strips. When the strips flex, the amount of current that is allowed to pass through changes, and the sensors detect those changes.
The signals are converted for wireless transmission to a receiver in the handheld reader. The reader uses software designed by Patterson that compares the sensor readings to a standard for each letter, based on the gestures for American Sign Language. Patterson added gestures for spaces between words, commas and periods — which don’t exist in American Sign Language – allowing the display screen on the reader to provide syntax.
“Conceptually, the technology sounds great,” said Karen Black, a spokeswoman for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf in Rochester, N.Y. But she pointed out that the Sign Translator only allows one-way communication, unless the hearing impaired person can read lips.
“It has opened the door halfway,” she said.
Robert Davila, chief executive at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and vice president at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said the device could be a boon for hearing impaired people who are uncomfortable communicating in anything but American Sign Language.
“The concept has merit, in my opinion, because there are avid ASL signers who do not possess sufficient ability to express their thoughts bilingually,” Davila wrote. Davila, who is hearing impaired, used e-mail to reach Small Times. “Therefore, if the patterns formed by the signs can be ‘read’ electronically or graphically, the potential for this system would be enormous.”
Patterson designed the software so the glove can be customized to each signer. “Everyone signs differently,” he said, similar to the distinctiveness of handwriting. “When you get the glove, you can program in your signs.”
Users can add gestures for more punctuation marks, too. The glove interprets only letters, not words or phrases, but can translate signs in microseconds.
Patterson is working on some programming bugs and looking for ways to reduce the cost of the glove. He estimated the parts used now add up to $135, but that buying in bulk would lower that. The labor of sewing them onto the glove would add to the price considerably, he suspected.
“I’d like to get the cost down to $200,” he said.
Cost of the glove, even at more than $200, might be offset by the savings to school districts that are required to provide interpreters for hearing impaired students. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between one and two of every 1,000 children in the United States have some kind of hearing impairment.
“It’s convenient, it saves money and it helps people gain independence,” Patterson said.
This was Patterson’s third year to participate at the Intel fair, which is open to only high school students. Last year he won some recognition for his Mazebot, a robotic search tool designed to scope out crisis situations. It included a microprocessor and wireless features that allowed it to be controlled remotely.
He came up with the concept after the fatal shootings at Columbine High School, also in Colorado. But a bomb threat at his own Central High School and incidents at the elementary school where his mother is an aide were even more compelling, he said. The project is now on hold.
“I had to put it to the side,” he said. “There is still so much work to develop it further.”
Patterson plans to enter his fourth and final Intel fair next year, although the project has yet to be defined. Like the Sign Translator project, he’ll have to squeeze it in between high school, courses at the community college, a 15- to 20-hour-a-week job (full-time in the summer) and now visits to campuses. He hasn’t named his top choice but the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University look attractive.
“I haven’t gotten a lot of sleep in the last year,” he confessed.
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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Candace Stuart at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 235.