TechGeeks_MindLR

According to WHO report, over 466 million people in the world are speech or hear impaired or both. In Bangladesh alone, over  13 million people are speech and hear impaired. This disability causes them to suffer from indescribable misery and they are often left out of education and  normal social life.

MindLR is a two way sign language translator which uses the camera in the laptop or phone to understand gestures and converts them into speech and vise versa. The solution also has a feature called sign to sign conversion which can convert sign language of one region to the standard one thus making communication and learning more effective for the speech and hear impaired person.

The speech and hear impaired person can utilize the platform to learn
and participate in social communication. Even common people can use the
app to converse with any speech and hear impaired person.

Over 466 million hear impaired people needs digital platform to make their life easier and yet there are very few effective solution. In Bangladesh, people of each district has their own form of sign language and its becoming really hard for the NGOs working with disable community to teach them or include them in mainstream schooling since the sign common people are using varies from the standard ones and all the materials/resources on sign language in Bangladesh are mostly done on the standard sign language thus leaving out a big population who could be benefited from these resources. Of the 13 million hear and speech impaired people, around 85% people are left out from mainstream education and training due to lack of proper sign conversion techniques and not availability of sign to sign conversion system.

The software will allow for the children with such disabilities to
attend regular schools and have a prosperous future. Such people can
join workplace where they can use the software to communicate
effectively. A normal person can use the software to communicate with a
speech and hear impaired person since they will not need to learn sign
language to converse, the software will do that for them.

We worked with  Center for disability  Bangladesh (CDD) to understand the need and challenges they face while dealing with speech and hear impaired person. The outcomes are:

1. The speech and hear impaired people in the villages are uneducated and in communicating with them becomes a challenge. They have their own sign language which is different from the standard one.

2. There are lack of human sign language translators and they are  costly to hire. NGOs and Govt. needs to invest a huge amount behind hiring translators.

3. A speech and hear impaired person don't have access to low cost digital system to express their signs through speech or a normal person who do not know sign language has no way to communicate with a speech and hear impaired person. They too need a digital translator to create an inclusive society.

MindLR will serve all these challenges since its a real time two way sign language translator and a sign to sign translator software that also work as a mobile application which make it truly accessible to anyone. Our main target is to make the solution in "Bangla" language for the people of Bangladesh.

MindLR is-

A two way sign language converter

It has sign to sign conversion capability

It has Bengali language support

MindLR is basically a software and a mobile application which uses computer's or mobile's camera and does image processing to read the gestures of a speech and hear impaired person in real time and using Artificial Intelligence it converts the gestures into speech. It also understand spoken words using natural language processing and coverts them back into sign language for speech and hear impaired person.

MindLR has a sign to sign language feature which enables it to read signs and using Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning it coverts the signs/gestures to another signs/gestures as selected by the user.

It will have a system to add vocabulary and signs or even a language library,. Its being developed primarily on English and Bengali language.

There are similar solution in playstore however they are only for English language and they do not that support for sign to sign conversion. Moreover they are not useful for the people of Bangladesh and are only effective if anyone knows American Sign Language. We are building MindLR to be a global platform for sign language translation. It will also serve as a device for training and learning for the speech and hear impaired community.

We have done an extensive research on the speech and hear impaired
community and even with some of the NGOs who are working with them.
Previously
we build a hardware gadget which could be worn as a gloves to be used
as a sign language translation however, that was not welcomed by over
87% people of that community since wearing external gloves with
circuitry is irritating to most of them. Then we came back with the
software that uses the device's camera to track gestures and translate
signs to speech which was welcomed by over 96% people as per our survey.
Moreover this method made the whole process much cheaper for them since
the solution of their misery is just a click away! Most importantly,
since the device will have Bengali language support, it will open up a
great possibilities or them to learn, effective communicate and
participate in the society in a more effective manner.

The product is in its prototyping face. We have a plan to reach at least
80,000 people within the first year of the launch of the application.
Within the first five years, we hope to reach at least 4 million people
with our solution.

Our goal to bring 13 million speech and hear impaired person in Bangladesh under one platform and enable them to effective learn and communicate through our digital software MindLR.

• Lack of resources

• Financial capacity

• Lack of access to university labs

• Lack of mentor ship to reach to the goal  in an effective manner

• Using Solve platform to communicate with proper resources

• Using the Tiger Challenge fund to build the application and make it available in play store

• Communicating with the universities to accelerate research relevant to the application's development

• Use SOLVE's network to accelerate patenting and other legal issues.

4 people are working full time on this project

Full Time: 2

Part Time :2

Contractor :1

We have 2 electronics and software engineer who have extensive
industry experience in prototyping and consumer grade software development . Our founder has experience in robotics and embedded system based product development. He also has extensive experience and knowledge on Machine learning and Artificial intelligence. He has experiences in product development and managing complete production cycle as a part of the organization he worked for. This is a valuable aspect in terms of technology product manufacturing. Also, the other team member is a Computer Science graduate who has over 3years of experience in digital marketing sector. She contributes both in software development and marketing. This team has a diverse set of skills which puts us in a better position in term of  testing out,
prototyping and manufacturing using the least n number of resources.

We are building both computer based software and mobile application. We will deploy the software in Govt. agencies, schools, NGOs and news/communication medias thus ensuring speech and hear impaired person can be benefited from them and at the same time it will save a lot of cost of human translator. We will take a minimal monthly/yearly subscription fee from all our users for the sustainability of the product. Gradually we have plans to utilize technology like Google Home and Alexa to make the system more mainstream for global people.

We will charge a small subscription fee from the user who will use the mobile application or the software. Apart from that we will also create educational and other recreational games/entertainment based features to the app which can be subscribed through local payment system.

The prize money of USD $2 million will help us to directly go into manufacturing. Current we have test prototypes but due to bootstrapped funding which is very limited, we are unable to try out different designs and even create an MVP for the idea.

Due to small team size its getting harder to look into all matters at a time and we feel the need to have a mentor on board who can guide us through successful implementation of the plan .

Tiger IT Foundation will be providing selected winners of the Tiger Challenge with strategic and operational support from a network of seasoned professionals and entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, including mentorship, office space, support with IP efforts, and more which is what we need the most at this moment to grow.

Center for disability development: Through deploying our software in their systems

USAID: Through deploying our software in all the NGOs that are working using USAID funds for the speech and hear impaired community

We will partner with them through deploying our software and mobile
application in their projects.  They already hire human translator while
working with speech and hear impaired person which is very costly. We
will try to find a way to make them dependable on our innovation.
Moreover, we will create the software as a platform for resource
creation and sharing. For example CDD already has a lot of educational
and vocational training for speech and hear impaired person. We will
host them in the software for everyone to be able to use it. Anyone will be able to use our software platform to create resources for speech and hear
impaired person. They will also be able to add new library or
images to train new forms of sign languages.