Think-e Wink-e is a Design Project Group from Department of Computer Engineering, Middle East Technical University. The group is formed by 4 senior students of the department who are currently working on the project PAPAĞAN, Turkish Sign Language Recognition using Microsoft Kinect. Further information about can be found in here.
Think-e Wink-e
PAPAĞAN
PAPAĞAN is a desktop application 
designed as a Research & Development project for working through Microsoft Kinect to recognize, understand and translate Turkish Sign Language(TSL).
According to statistics held by Family and Social Politics Ministry of Turkey the percentage of handicapped people in Turkey is 11%. Furthermore, 36% of those handicapped people are unable to read or write, where the number is 13% among non-handicapped people [1]. This makes it harder for handicapped people to merge into the daily social life. Because in order to handicapped people to communicate, either the handicapped party has to know how to write or both parties has to know the sign language which is a rare case in our society. PAPAĞAN is willing to create a solution for this problem by both translating the TSL to natural language and spreading the triteness of it.
The application provides two main functionalities to its users. First, by using the information we retrieved from Kinect, the incoming movement will be interpreted by the program and the meaning will be translated into text, audio and visuals to provide a bidirectional communication between speech disabled people and people who doesn’t know TSL. The second dimension of the project includes a interactive education tool for TSL to increase the number of TSL speakers in Turkey.
Due to the technical capabilities of 
Microsoft Kinect and the amount of work can be produced by 4 people in two semesters, PAPAĞAN’s coverage is limited to the basic TSL phrases, which are mostly reflected by movements. For the rest of the language, where the finger movements are also included, an extra and more professional approach will be required. For this manner PAPAĞAN is designed as a prototype for the further improvements in Kinect technology and to give a glimpse for what can be done by using it.
More information can be found in project documents.
[1] T.C. Aile ve Sosyal Politikalar Bakanlığı Özürlü ve Yaşlı Hizmetleri Genel Müdürlüğü. (n.d.). Türkiye Özürlüler araştırması temel göstergeleri. Retrieved from http://www.ozida.gov.tr/arastirma/oztemelgosterge.htm
