In the near future, medtech may take a cue from rock music. Indie musician Imogen Heap and her team of scientists and designers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise 200,000 pounds by May 3 to fund production of a data glove that can translate the wearer’s motion into sound.
While the wireless data glove’s first purpose is for musical composition and experiment, publicist Dan Siegel said conversations with medical and deaf community stakeholders are beginning. Other smart gloves have been created for healthcare, for purposes from remote patient monitoring to stroke rehabilitation, but this device’s emphasis on sound makes it unusual.
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The wearable can already interpret American Sign Language into sound. Check out the above video to see how the gloves are programmed to play YMCA. Potential for such a glove could allow a deaf person to speak American Sign Language to a non-fluent hearing person.
In the operating room, a glove could be used to train doctors. Maybe the second most promising feature of these data gloves for potential use in healthcare is that they use open source software and can be programmed to the user’s specific gestures and idiosyncrasies.
“So,” Heap notes in the Kickstarter video, “no one will ever use the gloves like you.”
If the Kickstarter campaign meets its goal, the gloves could be on the market for personal use as early as December 2014, Siegel said.
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