LED goggles convert speech to text for hearing impaired


Creating a fruitful and encouraging environment for young minds is a serious business and thanks to Turkey's 2023 Education Vision, students from all over the country are bringing out the scientists and inventors that lay inside of them.

Believing that they can do good for society with their inventions, two high school students from Düzce created special goggles for the hearing impaired which turns speech into text.

Düzce Science and Art Center (BİLSEM) students Ömer Berkay Biçen and Dağhan Akyürek rolled up their sleeves to make life easier for the hearing impaired and came up with light-emitting diode (LED) goggles which transfer spoken language into text.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency (AA), the project supervisor Adem Akkuş said the students from the Science and Art Center compete in national and international competitions with the projects they created.

"I really liked the idea of helping the hearing impaired citizens in society. I helped the students while developing their project. These goggles are the product of intense work and determination. Our aim is to turn the project into a more practical device," he added.

Dağhan Akyürek, one of the students who developed the goggles said their aim is to help the communication between a hearing impaired person and someone who does not know sign language.

He said they developed a simple but efficient system and explained, "We transfer the speech we pick up through the microphone to the LED screen of the goggles via and Arduino. With the mirror attached to the LED screen, the user is able to read the written text. We want to make life easier for the hearing impaired citizens."

Ömer Berkay Biçen, on the other hand, said their primary aim is to help the hearing impaired live their lives without needing a sign language translator.

"After our project got the green light from our project adviser, we collected the necessary hardware and wrote the codes that we needed to realize the project. After the first trial, we are happy to announce that the project was successful. We have created the goggles but mass production is a serious business," Biçen said.