This week I finished collecting data for all BSL letters. We found out that USB collection was much faster than bluetooth, so initially this process was proving to be quite a bit of a time sink until we made the switch halfway through. In addition, I looked into the haptic feedback circuit and will place an order for the linear vibration motor on Tuesday. The circuitry doesn’t look too complicated, the only thing I’m worried about is defining what haptic feedback even means in the context of our product. Ideally, we would want a different feedback to be generated based on how certain the word the user signed was transmitted, so something along the lines of if >90% a certain type of pulse, <30% another, and a maybe range as well, but I’m not sure if this is even feasible so plan to bring this up next meeting.
My progress is on schedule.
This upcoming week, in addition to implementing haptic feedback, I want to look into how we can augment our data as we transition to BSL. After this initial round of data collection, we are finding that a lot of the signs have very similar degrees of bending, and since we have decided not to go with any additional type of sensors, e.g. touch sensors, this will likely lead to a lower accuracy than ideal. This might involve going through the individual csv files for letters that are very similar and quantifying just how similar/different they are, and manipulating the data post-collection in some way to make them more distinct. Once Ricky trains the model over the weekend, I’ll have a better idea on how to more specifically accomplish this.