Fitting like a GlovePi: A wearable device for deaf-blind people

The paper presents the design and implementation of a low cost and open source assistive system exploiting a wearable device in order to support deaf-blind people in communication using the Malossi alphabet. More specifically, the system, that we called GlovePi, is composed by three main low cost components, such as: (i) a gardener glove; (ii) a Raspberry Pi; (iii) a MPR121 capacitive touch sensor module with expansion board. The MPR121 module works as bridge between the Raspberry Pi and the sensors in the glove, allowing the data transfer. Instead, the Raspberry Pi works as a hotspot wifi and as a server to transfer data to the client, an android application. In this way, the deaf-blind user can use the glove to deliver messages to other users, using the Malossi alphabet. The characters (and phrases) in this way created, will be sent to the android application and displayed or listen. Evaluation tests have been performed to measure the performance on the basis of false positive and false negative, obtaining interesting results in supporting to the feasibility of the here described approach.