Learning Sign Language from a Sanbot Robot

People with communication impairments, e.g., those with hearing loss or non-verbal autistic people, are a non-irrelevant number in modern society, so their inclusion is a very important issue. Different approaches can be used to achieve this, and in this paper we consider the use of sign language as a bridge to connect them with the rest of the world. To this aim, we propose an enjoyable and playful approach based on the use of an Elf Sanbot robot. We thus introduce two new applications that we have developed to interface with the robot. They can be installed in a smartphone or in a tablet, and can be used to remotely control the robot via Bluetooth or WiFI connection. The first application, called Sanbot Manager, is used to regulate the movements of the robot in the space and of the head. The second one, called Sanbot Server application, allows for interfacing the robot with a human, that proposes vocal or textual words or sentences, and the robot reacts by showing the corresponding video in sign languages on the robot’s screen. We think that these two applications, and in particular the Sanbot Server application, could be used to stimulate a person with a communication impairment, therapists, relatives, friends, to learn a sign language in an enjoyable way.