DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN ASSISTIVE SMART GLOVES FOR THE DISABLED

This project designs an assistive smart glove. It also constructs and tests the effectiveness of the glove with a view to improving the quality of life for the disabled. The glove is intended to bridge communication barriers, support rehabilitation, and assist with daily tasks by interpreting hand movements and providing feedback or interaction with external devices. The methodology involves designing a glove equipped with flex sensors, and microcontrollers to capture hand gestures. Detection of the movement of hands and gestures is done by the flex sensors in such gloves and these components are integrated with a wireless communication module for text or speech feedback. The results show that the smart glove reads hand gestures well and can provide feedback in text, audio, or control of a connected device. Each sensor successfully decoded messages such as “Hello”, “Thank you” and “I need help” out of many others. Sensor readings were transmitted to a mobile app, which converted the data into corresponding text and voice output. The system showed a high performance when it came to assisting impaired people while being measured by parameters such as gesture recognition accuracy, response time, and user happiness. In conclusion, the assistive smart gloves effectively showed how the glove can facilitate impaired persons' access to more opportunities, rehabilitation, and social participation assisting tor further development in assistive wearable technologies.