IDRT’s current SBIR award includes research on gesture recognition technology through the AcceleGlove, a high-tech glove embedded with sensors. It works with 3-D camera technology to capture hand movements.

AcceleGlove has implications beyond ASL translation. It could replace a joystick to maneuver sensitive robotics–the kind that venture into dangerous environments or control heavy machinery. Or it could be adapted for artificial simulation, to help train medical technicians.

About five years ago, Vinopol was contacted by Abdelhadi Soudi, a computational linguistics professor at Morocco’s Ecole National de l’Industrie Minerale. He’d found Vinopol’s research and wondered if she would be interested in adapting that technology for Moroccan Arabic sign language.

“I really didn’t know anything about Arabic when we started,” Vinopol says. “I don’t think he knew anything about sign language.”

And yet their collaboration–and assistive technology developed by their team–has been so successful, Morocco’s government is interested in using the technology in classrooms throughout the country.

Soudi and Vinopol received funding through Partnerships for Enhanced Engagement in Research (PEER), which links NSF-funded researchers in the U.S. with researchers in developing countries. USAID provides funding for the foreign scientist, and the ensuing collaboration benefits both countries.

Vinopol’s research is the only SBIR-supported work to ever receive supplemental funding from NSF’s Office of International Science and Engineering.

“The research promised international cooperation between the U.S. and Arab nations, at a time that couldn’t be more important,” says Glenn Larsen, a program director in NSF’s Engineering Directorate, which funds the SBIR program. “We saw it as a great broader impact to handle the needs of deaf students both here and abroad.”

A country in need

More than 85 percent of deaf children in Morocco lack access to education past primary school. The country has few well-trained deaf educators and has almost no sign language interpreters, which means deaf children are kept in segregated classrooms, with sparse instructional materials and little opportunity to interact with their hearing peers.

Soudi has spent the last 15 years working on machine translation between spoken languages–software to translate Arabic into French, for example. He was interested in the mechanics of translating a spoken language into a visual one.

“Translation between native spoken and sign languages involves not only analyzing linguistic differences, but also rendering translation from one cognitive processing modality (auditory) to another (visual),” he says.

It’s not a word-for-word translation. For example: Vinopol’s company previously helped WalMart use ASL translation for employee training, which included teaching people how to hang clothes on a rack. In English, “rack” is one word. In sign language, it depends on what the rack looks like: Is it thin or thick? High or low?

Soudi and Vinopol built technology that works as a real-time translation device and an instructional tool, converting Standard Arabic into Moroccan Sign Language (MSL) and offering resources like games and quizzes to help students and parents learn MSL.

A second PEER award, received in 2013, supports the creation of a MSL thesaurus, which will allow users to describe signs (the right hand is making this shape, the left hand looks like this) and find the Arabic word equivalent.

To get this technology into the hands of schools, the team has traveled all over the country, met with over a dozen deaf associations and caught the attention of government ministries.

The robust intellectual collaboration between Vinopol and Soudi is a core criteria for international activities funded by NSF’s international office, says Lara Campbell, a program director in that office.

“The unusual partnership between a small business and a foreign university brings a unique perspective to the table in terms of fundraising and structure,” she says. “I think the business perspective may help the work of this project expand not just across Morocco but eventually across the region.”

The most impressive results right now, however, may be how this technology affects deaf students and their families.

“Teachers, parents and students were positively astounded that software of this kind could be developed,” Soudi says. “It generated hope and advocacy on the part of parents that there could be better education and higher expectations for their children.”

Note:the news is from the internet.