Sign Language uses manual hand and body gestures
as well as non-manual facial expressions as a means of
communication between deaf and hearing communities. A
communication divide exists between the deaf and hearing
communities, to the disadvantage of the deaf. This paper explores
the design and implementation of a mobile application for South
African Sign Language recognition. The application connects, via
Bluetooth, to an instrumented glove developed by the University
of Cape Town. The objective is to recognize the manual alphabet
and manual numeric digits that have static gestures (31 signs in
total). Two neural networks (one with a log-sigmoid, and one
with a symmetric Elliott activation function) and a Support
Vector Machine (SVM) were compared. The SVM was chosen
for implementation primarily because of its high accuracy of
99% and its superior robustness. The mobile application is
developed for Android and allows the user to connect to a
Bluetooth glove, display and dictate the classification output and
calibrate the connected glove. On a low-end smartphone, the
classification time did not exceed 45ms, the memory usage did
not exceed 15 MB, and the battery life during typical usage was
approximately 11 hours.