Abstract
Deaf-blindness forces people to live in isolation. At present, there is no existing technological solution enabling two (or many) deaf-blind people to communicate remotely among themselves in tactile Sign Language (t-SL). When resorting to t-SL, deaf-blind people can communicate only with people physically present in the same place, because they are required to reciprocally explore their hands to exchange messages. We present a preliminary version of PARLOMA, a novel system to enable remote communication between deaf-blind persons. It is composed of a low-cost depth sensor as the only input device, paired with a robotic hand as the output device. Essentially, any user can perform hand-shapes in front of the depth sensor. The system is able to recognize a set of hand-shapes that are sent over the web and reproduced by an anthropomorphic robotic hand. PARLOMA can work as a “telephone” for deaf-blind people. Hence, it will dramatically improve the quality of life of deaf-blind persons. PARLOMA has been presented and supported by the main Italian deaf-blind association, Lega del Filo d'Oro. End users are involved in the design phase.
Highlights
Recent technological advances in modern low-cost sensing technologies have pushed the research on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) towards the development of natural and intuitive interaction techniques
We test the recognition module (Section 4.1), i.e., the ability of the system to recognize hand-shapes; secondly, we test the transmission efficiency of the whole system (Section 4.2) by measuring the loss of information during the recognition and reproduction phases in a testcase scenario; an experimental session performed with a deaf-blind subject is presented (Section 4.3) to assess the overall usability of the system
The receiver is able to understand the sign performed by the robot hand using tactile sensingLu. dovico Orlando Russo, Giuseppe Airò Farulla, Daniele Pianu, Alice Rita Salgarella, Marco Controzzi, Christian Cipriani, Calogero Maria 7
Summary
Recent technological advances in modern low-cost sensing technologies have pushed the research on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) towards the development of natural and intuitive interaction techniques. Hand gestures are a natural part of human interaction with both machines and other humans They are an intuitive and simple way to transmit information and commands (such as zoom in or out, drag and drop). Object tracking techniques can be classified into two main classes: either invasive approaches, based on tools which are physically linked to the object (sensitized gloves [12] or markers [13]), or non-invasive approaches. The former are usually fast and computationally light, but often very expensive and cumbersome. Low-cost acquisi‐ tion systems, such as RGB-D cameras, represent a powerful tool for projects that aim at developing cheap and affordable solutions
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