Across the globe, 70 million people have severe hearing and speech impairments. There is rarely a medical solution to being deaf or mute, and people with these disabilities often live at high levels of social exclusion. While I was traveling in Ukraine, a group of engineering students in their twenties showed me a shiny black-and-blue robot glove called Enable Talk that uses flex sensors in the fingers to recognize sign language and translate it to text on a smartphone via Bluetooth. This text is in turn converted to speech, allowing the deaf and mute person to be able to now “speak” and be
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