Designing an Electronic Hand Glove for Teaching Vowels to Deaf Children

Children with hearing impairment at birth face a variety of barriers related to development of language and communication skills. They have difficulties in the learning process in specialized and regular institutes; in addition they have difficulties to relate with the society. Nowadays, interactive systems as videogames are being used not only for entertainment purposes, but also in the educational context to promote the construction of knowledge in a didactic and interactive way, this as a support to the teaching/learning process. For this reason, this paper proposes an interactive system that tries to support the teaching process of vowels to deaf children, which is composed of a videogame and an electronic glove. This paper presents a tangible object, such as the electronic hand glove, for the child to achieve a multisensory interaction with the videogame. The child provides input data to the videogame by using the glove. He must represent each vowel of a word by the dactylology alphabet. The glove was built using flex sensors, which detect the movements of the children’s fingers. Considering the potential of an electronic glove to support the process of teaching literacy and reinforcing the dactylology alphabet, it could be used to acquire and consolidate knowledge in a non-traditional way, generating a better learning experience and a greater motivation for the child.