Young Innovators: Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi 

Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, alumni of the University of Washington, USA, have created gloves that can track the American Sign Language (ASL) and convert it into text and sound. The gloves, called ‘SignAloud’, are equipped with sensors that track the wearer’s hand movements and gestures. This data is wirelessly transferred to a central computer, which recognises the movements and converts them into speech with the help of a speaker. Pryor and Azodi were awarded the 2016 Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Student Prize for the SignAloud gloves. These gloves aim to enable deaf people to communicate more efficiently.