Digital-glove maker reaches for students

OGDENSBURG — In his effort to develop a glove that can turn the movement of a hand into type on a computer screen, an Ogdensburg scientist is taking advantage of one of St. Lawrence County's most abundant resources: students.

Michael Linderman, president and chief scientist of Norconnect Inc., is reaching out to colleges and high schools to help him develop the device, which could be used for everything from writing to developing prosthetics.

"My intent is to work with local universities and to get as many students involved as possible," he said. "I'm really excited about meeting with potential users and hopefully employees for us if the company develops the project."

Mr. Linderman, along with professors and students from SUNY Potsdam, St. Lawrence University, Canton, and Syracuse University, will present a prototype of the device and try to drum up support for the project at a symposium at 5 p.m. Nov. 16 at Dunn Hall at SUNY Potsdam.

The researchers also will use the time to get advice from people who are potential customers, so the tool can develop a niche in the growing eBook and Smartpen market, Mr. Linderman said.

"There have been discussions about having students work with the prototype," said Timothy V. Fossum, SUNY Potsdam computer science chairman. "Right now we don't have any students that are directly involved from Potsdam's campus, but there is a lot of stuff to do and a lot of software to write to make it commercially viable that they could do."

Mr. Linderman, along with Joseph S. Erlichman, SLU associate professor of biology, has been working on the device since 2004 with grant money from the National Science Foundation. Recently the research team completed a prototype of the device that looks like a bicycle glove, Mr. Linderman said. It detects the small emissions of electricity from each muscle in the hand as it moves and these electric bursts are then analyzed and converted to script on a computer screen.

In a few months the researchers hope to start holding sessions with college and high school students across the county to use the device and discuss ideas for the product's development.

"We're going to record their movements and put it into our database for our system to learn the different bursts of electricity and to be more educated to be able to convert it better to text," he said. "It will be one on one. A session will be approximately an hour. My goal is to record as many as possible and then we will create an industrial prototype."