UT Dallas Team Receives 2nd Place Award for Best Engineering Design in 2022

Established in 2019, the ExCEllence in Senior Design Showcase was created to provide Electrical and Computer Engineering students in the Southwest region with an opportunity to showcase their cutting-edge projects and compete for the highly-coveted Best Engineering Design Award.

This year’s showcase took place on the 19th and 20th of May at the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at the University of Texas at Dallas. 13 universities participated in the two-day event, presenting their projects in front of a panel of esteemed judges, faculty, and other industry executives.

A team of six electrical and computer engineering seniors (Andy Bui, Nighao Shi, Hamza Islam, David Wang, Eugene Lin, and Jimmy Nguyen) came together to represent the University of Texas at Dallas. As part of their UTDesign Capstone project, the team created a Smart Sign Language Glove with the goal of assisting young adults who have hearing impairments as they attempt to learn the basics of the sign language alphabet.

With more than 10 million Americans being hard of hearing and about 1 million being functionally deaf, there is a need to invest more resources into ensuring that American Sign Language (ASL) becomes more accessible to communities across the country.

The goal of the team’s project was to find a technology-powered approach to making learning American Sign Language more seamless. In American Sign Language, hand gestures or movements are often used to create words. The function of the Smart Sign Language Glove is to analyze hand positions and motion, and then interpret and display the letters on a tablet.

The Smart Sign Language Glove utilizes sensors built along the glove to gather data about the hand’s position and motion. Through Bluetooth, the glove sends data to an Android application for processing. Afterwards, a machine learning algorithm built into the application transforms the raw data into a letter. It is then sent to the screen to display the detected letter, as well as to communicate it through speech-to-text. This process makes it easy for early stage learners or beginners to speedily gain a good grasp of the alphabet letters, which is the fundamental aspect of any language.

On day two of the Excellence in Senior Design showcase, the judges selected three Best Engineering Design awardees. The UT Dallas team received a 2nd place award for their effort in creating the highly innovative Smart Sign Language Glove!

Next year, the Excellence in Senior Design Showcase will be heading to Albuquerque, New Mexico. By participating in an Electrical and Computer Engineering Capstone project, seniors have an opportunity to compete in the 2023 Best Engineering Design competition.

Additionally, organizations looking to gain access to a pool of engineering talent can get involved in the UTDesign Capstone program by becoming corporate sponsors. Projects handed off to UTDesign Capstone teams turn into forward-looking solutions such as the one this team successfully developed.

Curious about how working with a UTDesign Capstone team can benefit your company? Contact us to learn more here.