Faculty: Ellen Yi Luen Do

Student: Marc Lawson

Formerly “Talk 2 the Hand,“ the Helping Hand device was originally designed as a tactile language learning apparatus for the Happy Healthy Home course with  Instructor  Ellen Yi Luen Do.  Funded as a seed grant from the Health Systems Institute, it has been renamed "Helping Hand" and emerged as an immersive tool to assist in object recognition and improve the hand-eye coordination skills of the visually impaired.

By definition hand-eye coordination is the ability of the vision system to coordinate the information received through the eyes to control and direct the hands to carry out a given task, such as reaching for a phone or picking up a box of cereal.  The loss of functional vision has an adverse effect on the performance of these tasks. 

This solution serves as an appropriate tool that can improve the functional skills and quality of life for the visually impaired. 

The existing glove currently supports object recognition.   Objects are labeled with passive RFID tags.  When the antenna of the glove comes in close contact with a tagged object, audible feedback relating to that object is played.  Users of the system can choose different languages (e.g., English, Spanish, Japanese, etc.) for the audio playback.