Most people in the world aren’t familiar with sign language, making it awfully difficult for deaf people to get their message across. This is something that a young Kenyan inventor by the name of Roy Allela knows all too well. His 6-year-old niece was born deaf and struggles to communicate with her family, none of whom know sign language. That’s why he invented a pair of smart gloves which converts sign language movements into audio speech. The gloves work by recognizing various letters signed by sign language users and transmitting this data to a smartphone application where it is vocalized. The invention could potentially help over 30 million people suffering from speech impairments to communicate more easily with non-sign language users.