Sign-O-MYO

Inspiration

With a full schedule of classes towards your degree, it's hard to find time for non-degree related interests, such as languages. American Sign Language in particular requires one to be physically in class to learn. Sign-O-MYO provides a solution to this predicament, allowing you to quiz yourself in the language at home, using the MYO armband to detect your movements.

What it does

After learning ASL on your own, you can go to this website to quiz yourself on common words and phrases.

How we built it

After familiarizing ourselves with the MYO armband, we were able to manipulate its open source code to collect orientation data at regular intervals and verify that movements corresponded with specific words or phrases in ASL. This was done by repeating movements while wearing the armband and setting a specific range of orientation coordinates to correspond with a sign. We then created a website using HTML that utilized a quiz format and allowed you to test yourself on basic ASL words and phrases.

Challenges we ran into

We first tried using Leap Motion, but the device was too finnicky to identify differences in hand and finger movements. We created a domain name with Domain.com but we faced issues with the DNS. When starting to work with MYO armband, we started off in C++, which would have been very difficult to integrate into our website in HTML, which is why we ended up using Javascript. We were originally going to use two armbands simultaneously, but we could barely figure out one.