Signing Gloves: Inclusive or Offensive?

Inclusivity is the term of our generation and something people are gradually striving to bring about in our day to day life. Everything from communication and accessibility to safe spaces and hiring regulations make it possible for minority groups and the less fortunate to find equal footing. Being personally passionate about social justice, I realized technological innovations made to better the lives of those with disabilities play a very important role. One such innovation that caught my eye was sign language translating gloves.

Several projects based on this concept have been floating around the internet but the one I'd like to discuss is the prototype developed by engineering students from Polytechnique Montreal in 2012.

The following is the link to its demonstration at TEDxUdeM:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpcI5h1EuqI

IxD
It's interactive design is simple; hand gestures that represent a sign language get translated to speech and text when plugged into a computer or smartphone. This allows people that are hard of hearing to communicate to a certain extent with hearing people.

UI
This product is easy to use and understand. It uses fibre optics, light sensors on the phalanx and detectors in the host device to transliterate sign language. While it is certainly quite effective, it isn't (at least in its early stages) very efficient.
It has several limitations which I'll discuss below.

UX
Since these gloves are only in prototype stages and not yet available in the market, it is hard to judge its overall user experience. However, the idea alone seems quite impressive. The user would only need to wear these gloves in order to communicate in their usual way.

There are several different aspects that need to be addressed for this particular innovation. Apart from its technological aspects, one must consider the societal impacts of this device. While in its most basic form this seems extremely useful, those familiar with the deaf community (and I am in no way an expert, I just had to read a lot) would be a little hesitant to accept it. The deaf community is just that, a community. It has its own language, behaviour, arts and value system. There are several people within the community that do not find the need to be hearing, and sometimes refuse to undergo surgery to receive cochlear implants. Certain people would argue that such a technological device only makes it easier for the hearing people, they are the ones this product benefits. It discourages hearing people from making an effort to communicate with people from the deaf community by understanding sign language, talking slower, etc. Being sensitive to those in the deaf community should be (and they really want to be, from what I could tell by the video) of the utmost priority while working on enhancing this device.

Coming to its technological aspects, the most important concern would be the accuracy of its translations. As you could see in the video (or the stills) it is quite difficult to capture it 100% accurately. It would need a lot of work to correctly interpret every word.
An issue one can imagine is same gestures differing in their placement which could mean different things. For example the hand gesture for both 'mother' and 'father' in American Sign Language happen to be the same, however the mother gesture is placed at the chin and the father gesture on the forehead (images provided below for reference). While the video doesn't demonstrate it, I'm hoping it resolves this problem since the glove deals with hand gestures and their position in space.

 

There is also the issue of portability, having wires hanging off your hands doesn't seem very appealing and especially not when this includes hand gestures and movement. They seem to be working on this specific issue about making it wireless. That would definitely improve user experience.

Time. Another factor that hopefully has been taken into account in its improvement stages. It seems to need repeated gesturing to make its translation for in practicality seems not very efficient for both the design or the user experience. Imagine having to talk one word at a time, but for the deaf community it would be repeating multiple hand gestures which could get really old really fast.

All in all I thought this was quite a good idea at least for those in the deaf community for when they are in unfamiliar situations where they either don't have someone to interpret for them or need immediate assistance. Like they mentioned in the video, it is critical to have people from the deaf community itself to be their critics and help in the improvement of this device. It would also be really cool to have a device that did the opposite and worked independently to create hand gestures for the hearing people to communicate with the deaf community.