- ZeroBionic, founded by Norah Kimathi, makes a 3D-printed robotic hand that converts speech into sign language in real time for deaf students in Kenyan classrooms.
- Each hand is printed from recycled plastic waste, sells for $350, is designed to last three years without maintenance, and the company says 78 have been sold.
- Kenya has no standardized sign language, so the team recruited deaf teachers and experienced signers to record signed speech and build a dataset that did not previously exist.
A 22-year-old engineer in Nairobi has built a robotic hand that turns a teacher’s spoken words into sign language, so deaf children can be taught by teachers who cannot sign.
Around 300,000 children in Kenya are deaf or hearing impaired, and only a fraction of them are enrolled in school.
Part of the reason is that the country has no standardized sign language, which makes subjects built on precise vocabulary, like maths and science, extremely difficult to teach.
Norah Kimathi’s answer was to take the requirement for a signing teacher out of the equation. Her robotic hand listens to whoever is at the front of the room and signs what they say, so a teacher who never learned to sign can still teach a deaf pupil.
ZeroBionic says the hands are 92% accurate at converting speech to sign.
Building the hardware turned out to be the straightforward half of the job. When the team went to feed the translations in, they found there was no unified Kenyan or African sign language dataset to work from.
“No one else had built this on the continent … We had to start from scratch,” Kimathi told AFP from the company’s small lab in Nairobi.
Deaf teachers and experienced signers were brought in to record the movements and patterns of signed speech, wearing an electrode-lined bodysuit the company had to import from abroad.
Each finished hand is 3D-printed from recycled plastic litter and sold at $350, with a design life of three years without maintenance. The company says 78 units are now in the field.
The hands are only the first step for the company. Next, ZeroBionic is working on Africa One, a robotic upper torso intended to widen the vocabulary and sharpen the accuracy of African sign language translation.
Kimathi says all of it has been worth the effort.
“We know we’re going to put a smile on someone else’s face,” she said.
