Users who are congenitally deafblind face major challenges in communicating with other people and often rely on an intervener with who they communicate with using a manual sign language. In recent years -to allow for deafblind individuals to communicate more independently- a number of haptic gloves have been developed that can recognize and/or convey manual sign languages. These gloves are expensive to construct and currently not commercially available. To address this issue we present a bimanual communication aid, called AUTOSEM that instead of using the hand as a display surface for manual signs, uses combinations of different orientations of both hands to define a set of semaphores that can represent an alphabet. A significant benefit of our technique is that it uses both hands and it can be implemented using low-cost motion sensing devices. User studies with fourteen able-bodied users evaluate both the output and input capabilities of our technique. A deafblind individual provided qualitative feedback on AUTOSEM using a case study.
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