Bulgarians Create App to Help Hearing Impaired People Communicate with Words

A Bulgarian team of young scientitrst is developing an application that will make it possible for people with impaired hearing to communicate with words. In practice, this will remove barriers to communication for 360 million people, which according to the World Health Organization is the number of people around the world with impaired hearing. Without any funding, a group of Bulgarina students has worked for a year to create a unique application.

It all started by accident a year ago. Oleg and a group of students were having a break between lectures at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of the University of Sofia and sat down for a cup of coffee. They witnessed a heated conversation between deaf people. They did not understand anything ... but wanted to.

Oleg Kamenstyk, a student at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University: “As programmers, our nature is not to like things we do not understand. And we started to think about how such a language could be rendered.”

Almost immediately after that, seven young programmers, an industrial designer and economist started to work on the app. They call it Velar, because in linguistics, the symbol that represents the velar consonants is the Greek letter "gamma" and in Glagolitic it means "I say, I speak." According to the creators of Velar application, it is a symbolic continuity between the work of Saints Cyril and Methodius (creators of Slavic alphabet) and our duty to build upon on what has already been created.

The team is working on the first-of-its-kind device for gesture recognition.

Oleg says that finger sensors report the folds of the hand fingers by rotating the designated boards and transmit them wirelessly to the computer where these folds are processed and turned into a 3D visualization of the hand.

Using artificial intelligence, the recognized gestures from the hand will turn into acoustic speech. It will be accepted by every smartphone. So it will be possible to hear the words of the person with hearing impairment, who will see them visualized in the same smartphone.

“The language of gestures is not just a language, it is a whole world, it is much more emotional than the language we speak,” Oleg says.

The young scientists have a lot of work to do. And a need of funding. Oleg believes that his idea will soon become a reality. He says God is leading him in his work. Before he decided to study Informatics, he studied at the Sofia Theological Seminary. He chose the path of science to prove that it does not contradict the faith, as many believe.

Therefore faith serves as an inspiration, to seek to bring something useful and good to the world. And science gives me ways to do it, Oleg added.

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