President Uhuru Kenyatta praised the efforts of Roy Allela, 25, an engineering student from Nairobi University who invented smart gloves that auto-translate sign language into speech.
You may wonder what drove Roy, a man with perfect hearing, no speech impediment, and limited experience with sign language to invent a solution to the challenges of impairment.
As the President mention, it is the love for his niece that drove him to the invention.
A desire to effectively communicate with his deaf seven-year-old niece motivated him to invent a set of smart gloves which he called Sign-IO. The gloves can convert sign-language movements into audible speech in real-time.
The University of Nairobi graduates, hold a bachelor’s degree in Microprocessor Technology and Instrumentation.
The Sign-IO gloves use a support vector machine to recognize the user’s various signs. The device predicts which gesture the user signed and the data is then transmitted to an Android Application for vocalization.
This implies that the glove’s fingers have sensors that measure the articulations of the user’s fingers. Using the measurements that gloves can then identify the gestures that have been signed. The process has an accuracy rate of around 93%.
The gloves can also give users a voice since it allows them to tailor the audio to their liking including settings for language, vocal pitch, and gender.
Allela currently works as a manager at Intel as well as a teacher of date science at Oxford University.
Through his website http://www.royallela.com, Alella says his interests include machine learning, computer vision, and embedded systems.
Allela envisions the installation of at least two pairs of such gloves in every school for hard-of-hearing students in Kenya and hopes his invention will curtail the stigma associated with deafness and speech impediments.
When asked how his invention helped his young niece, Alella told Good People News that: “The general public in Kenya doesn’t understand sign language, so when she goes out, she always needs a translator. Imagine that dependency over the long term—how much that plagues or impairs her progress in life. When it affects you personally, you see how hard people have it in life. That’s why I’ve really striven to develop this project to completion.”
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Apart from the Sign-IO project, Alella has also been a key contributor to the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s DEEP NLP project, investigating the use of natural language processing for document analysis and classification.
As an innovator, Alella has won the Hardware Trailblazer Award at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ 2027 Innovation Showcase. In 2018, he also became the second runner-up for the Royal Academy of Engineering Leaders in Innovation Fellowship.
Speaking at the Gusii Stadium during the 57th Mashujaa Day celebrations, President Uhuru praised Alela alongside other young innovators including two students from the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) – Michael Malombo Mwaisakenyi and Ken Kioria Gicira who call themselves “the Knights”- no relation to the 13th-century crusaders- invented a high-tech automated weeding robot.
The robot which uses Artificial Intelligence (A.I) eliminates the need for the use of herbicides in controlling weeds.
The robot discriminates between weeds and crops through cameras and uses the same cameras to navigate through the farm, in-between rows of crops together with a rotary en
Uhuru also praised the efforts of 800 youth currently holed in Manyani, delving into seminal programs that include the National Wide Airborne Geophysical Survey, the Geospatial Project, the Cyber Project, Drones, and the National Security Industrial Project.
