ITB's Sign Language Interpreter Wins E2FESTA Award
The joint team of ITB and Gwangju University students received the Excellence award at the Global Capstone Design Fair & Engineering Education Festa (E2Festa) 2018 at the Korea International Exhibition Center (Kintex) 2 Ilsan, South Korea.
The ITB Directorate of Public Relations and Publication stated in a press release received in Bandung on Wednesday that the team consisted of three ITB students and two Gwangju students. In addition to receiving a certificate, the team also received a cash prize of 500,000 Korean won.
The ITB student who was on the team was Dharma Kurnia Septialoka (Informatics Engineering 2014), Violla Tania from the Industrial Engineering department, class of 2014, and Gilang Ginaris Mulia (Mechanical Engineering 2014). The two students from Gwangju University are Oh Minwoo and Choi Kyumin from the Electrical and Electronics department.
The team named Let's Talk succeeded in winning the excellence award through its innovative product of translating hand gestures from sign language to voice and translating voice to text.
This innovative product was developed to help deaf and mute people communicate.
Dharma Kurnia Septiloka, a team member, said the device works by capturing sign language movements and then converting them into sound.
He said that people who perform sign language movements wear gloves with flex sensors, accelerometer sensors and gyroscope sensors installed.
Then these sensors will be translated by the translation tool.
"This tool not only helps translate body language, but is also useful for normal people in understanding body language movements," he said.
Besides being able to convert movements into sounds, this tool can also convert sounds into letters.
He said the tool had been tested at the Cicendo Special Needs School (SLB) in Bandung and had achieved good results.
Many people with disabilities feel helped by this tool and in the future, he hopes that this application can be used for communication needs between normal people and those with special needs.
The team developed the product for approximately eight months through the 2018 International Students Joint CAPStone Design Project (i-CAPS) program.
There are 21 products included in this activity which come from various universities from within and outside South Korea, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, India, Japan, China, Thailand, Hong Kong and the United States.
E2Festa is an annual event to showcase capstone design project products from universities from within and outside South Korea.
This activity was first held in 2012 and is the largest activity for the engineering and industrial sector in South Korea.
In 2018, E2Festa was hosted by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and organized by the Korean Institute for Advancement of Technology and the Korea Association of Innovation Centers for Engineering Education with the theme Super Challenger.