UNS — The Student Creativity Program (PKM) team of Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS) Surakarta succeeded in creating Indonesian Sign System Translator Gloves (SIBI) named “Glova”. These gloves translate SIBI into a sequence of words for the speech-hearing-impaired, particularly those with speech disabilities. The device incorporates assistive technology for the speech-hearing impaired with the Levenshtein distance algorithm.
The Glova project was developed by the PKM Karsa Cipta (KC) UNS team, which consists of four students: Ananda Putra Kanieza and Gilang Fajar Ramadhan from the Electrical Engineering Study Program (Prodi) of the Faculty of Engineering (FT), Dea Muthia Febry and Velisa Nur Ainie from the Physics Education Study Program of the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education Sciences (FKIP).
Under the guidance of Dr. Eng. Faisal Rahutomo, this technological innovation succeeded in obtaining research funding of 6 million IDR from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (Kemendikbudristek) of the Republic of Indonesia (RI) in 2023.
Ananda Putra Kanieza, the team’s leader, explained to uns.ac.id that Glova will be dedicated to the speech-hearing impaired as part of the commitment to realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Assistive technology plays a vital role in achieving the SDGs, especially regarding inclusion, improving the quality of life for all individuals, and equality for persons with disabilities. The technology was developed to facilitate communication between speech-hearing impaired individuals and the general population.
Moreover, Ananda noted that the existing technologies had limited accuracy due to the similarity of hand gestures for several letters. For this reason, Ananda and his team combined this technology with the Levenshtein distance algorithm as an autotext correction algorithm. They also provided training for users with special needs.
This device utilizes flex sensors on the five fingers to translate hand gestures into words derived from the sequence of translated letters. Many Indonesian words have been input into the system’s database so that the technology, known as Glova, can provide real-time translation and correct letter errors when forming word sequences.
“The advantage of this product is that the audio output of the composed words can appear on the LCD screen and Blynk application on the first line, and corrections can be seen on the second line in case of errors. We hope that people with speech-hearing impaired can benefit from this technology, especially when communicating with people, who tend to be unfamiliar with sign language gestures,” Ananda said.
*Humas UNS*
Reporter: R. P. Adji
Editor: Dwi Hastuti