Across the Board Magazine
April, 1994

Sightings
April, 1994 - page 64

Digital Communication
by Marilyn Stern

Some 20,000 deaf-blind Americans may soon join the Information Age. The breakthrough comes in the form of a robotic hand that converts electronic signals into standard finger-spelling positions that are "read" by touching.

The mechanical miracle worker is named RALPH, short for Robotic ALPHabet. Now in its fourth prototype phase. RALPH has been refined through feedback from deaf-blind student testers at Washington, DC's Gallaudet University, which commissioned the project. An earlier version of the hand won a "best concepts" award last year from I.D. (International Design) Magazine, which praised the device for addressing the needs of "the forgotten consumers".

These isolated individuals indeed have special needs. The majority owe their condition to Usher's Syndrome, which causes deafness at birth and gradual loss of sight in young adulthood. Most are illiterate in braille, which is difficult to learn as an adult, but fluent at sign language and the One-Hand Manual Alphabet used by RALPH. Conveying up to four characters per second, RALPH holds the promise of access to print and broadcast media, computers, telephones, and - perhaps most important - face-to-face conversations, without constant dependence on human interpreters. Such conversations would be something like e-mail, with the seeing person typing on a keyboard and the deaf-blind person speaking, typing, or - in the future - even finger-spelling back through a cyber-wired glove.

RALPH was developed at the Rehabilitation Research and Development Center at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Palo Alto, CA, with help from the Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories at A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, DE. With their new, improved hand in hand, RALPH's creators are seeking a commercial producer.