A tactile-proprioceptive communication aid for users who are deafblind

Users who are congenitally deafblind face major challenges in communicating with other people and often rely on an intervener with who they communicate with using a manual sign language. In recent years -to allow for deafblind individuals to communicate more independently- a number of haptic gloves have been developed that can recognize and/or convey manual sign languages. These gloves are expensive to construct and currently not commercially available. To address this issue we present a bimanual communication aid, called AUTOSEM that instead of using the hand as a display surface for manual signs, uses combinations of different orientations of both hands to define a set of semaphores that can represent an alphabet. A significant benefit of our technique is that it uses both hands and it can be implemented using low-cost motion sensing devices. User studies with fourteen able-bodied users evaluate both the output and input capabilities of our technique. A deafblind individual provided qualitative feedback on AUTOSEM using a case study.