Tatum Robotics uses robots to make communication more accessible to Deaf-blind people.
Tatum Robotics founder and chief executive officer Samantha Johnson told me in an interview earlier this month her company began as a byproduct of her Master’s thesis while at Northeastern. As she explained, as an undergrad student, she took an American Sign Language, or ASL, class and part of the curriculum was going out into the community and find Deaf people with whom to practice signing and become more immersed in Deaf culture. It was then when Johnson met a Deaf-blind woman and began talking about how the woman communicates.
According to Johnson, the woman told her she didn’t have access to independent communication and could not talk to anyone unless someone were directly beside her. This is because, Johnson said, many in the Deaf-blind community rely on touch by way of tactile signing; this method refers to holding the hands of the signer in order to receive communication. During the pandemic’s apex—or nadir, if you prefer—social distancing protocols limited availability of interpreting for Deaf-blind people, so Johnson and others at Boston’s Deaf Blind Contact Center began developing prototypes for robotic hands that would relay signs to Deaf-blind people, hoping to commercialize the technology.
In a nutshell, Tatum Robotics is emblematic of Johnson’s background as an engineering student and of her interest in disability and assistive technology. She was candid in telling me she didn’t know anything about the Deaf-blind community before volunteering; through her work, she happily discovered what she described as “some lovely people” who gave her an opportunity to build relationships and, crucially, hone her signing skills. As she started building up projects like the aforementioned prototypes, it crystallized in Johnson’s mind that helping this group of people was something she wanted to invest in for the long haul.
“I always make the joke that I get more hugs than any startup founder ever gets because we get people crying,” Johnson said. “We give people big smiles [and] hugs. Part of our goal is to have an inclusive team. We [at Tatum Robotics] have Deaf-blind consultants [and] we travel all over the United States to try to get feedback from Deaf-blind individuals. It’s something that I feel very lucky to pursue and that I get to support this community that is flourishing and give them that extra sense of independence and communication [and] allow them to grow.”
Technologically speaking, Johnson said Tatum Robotics’ first product is capable only of fingerspelling. As ever with technology, the kind of technical capabilities for something capable of full hand signs don’t currently exist. If the team were to bide their time and work towards that ideal, Johnson said it would take much longer for something to come to market. Thus, the fingerspelling hand represents what’s possible right now. Johnson did offer the tiniest of peeks behind the proverbial curtain, however, telling me the company is development what she characterized as a “full anthropomorphic robotic arm” but, as a practical matter, is taking baby steps with the fingerspelling version. She described the product as a cloud-based system with a “very thin robot client” that acts essentially as a messenger app that can pull data like news stories and more. To name one example, Johnson said the robot can take weather information and, by using linguistic algorithms, will translate that from English into ASL that a Deaf-blind person could understand. The device is fully customizable, so a person can control what data they get, as well as attributes like signing speed and more. As a physical object, Johnson emphasized the robot “looks like a hand and feels like a hand” such that “definitely folks can hold on to it and receive the signs into their hand.” All told, Johnson said the user is really in control of the experience, which has proven itself during the beta-testing stage of development.
At a technical level, Johnson and team have taught the robot signs through motion capture. They then map the signs to the robots, utilizing advanced algorithms that ensure the hand moves fluidly and optimizes the transition between hand shapes. This software, Johnson said, allows for the team to be mindful of the variances in how different people sign so as to be inclusive of everyone. Not everyone signs exactly alike.
Haben Girma, a human rights attorney, disability advocate, and the first-ever Deaf-blind woman to graduate from Harvard Law School, posted on X over the weekend about Tatum Robotics’ work appearing at this annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference in Anaheim, California, held this past week. In her post, Girma said in part Tatum Robotics’ device “[expands] accessibility choices for Deaf-blind people.”
When asked about feedback, Johnson was quick and unequivocal in her response by saying “we wouldn’t be doing it if there wasn’t kind of this kind of real push” for this type of technology. For her, Johnson said she was encouraged before graduation to think about practical applications towards helping people since she’d done so only in an academic sense. That sentiment is ultimately the force that propelled her to start Tatum Robotics and move forward towards actually helping people in the real world. Moreover, Johnson noted that while there is a lot of assistive technology for Deaf people and for Blind people, with lots of overlap, there isn’t a lot out there designed specifically for the Deaf-blind community. Tatum Robotics, then, is trying to use the available resources and build atop of them to make something especially for Deaf-blind folks so that, as Johnson said, “they’re not forgotten in technology.” This is important because Johnson said blindness and deafness typically lives on opposite sides; Deaf-blind people don’t use Braille, for instance, the same way a Blind person does. Only 10% of what she called “generalized Blind people” even use Braille to read. Most people, Johnson added, become Deaf-blind later in life, saying to me that Tatum Robotics’ solution is ultimate a tool which “fills this space that technology has [historically] really been on the opposite sides of.”
Looking towards the future, Johnson was succinct in telling me her company’s main mission is to raise awareness of the Deaf-blind community and be there for them. Johnson and team want to “build a more accessible world” for Deaf-blind people. The first step has been focused on the home, but Johnson called that “the base level” and said the company aspires to do more outreach to grocery stores, libraries, healthcare settings, and more to expand on the potential for their technology. As ever with accessibility and assistive technologies, the overarching goal, she said, is to give those in the Deaf-blind community increased autonomy and independence in their day-to-day lives.
“With technology, we’re in such a great time that there’s all these things we can we can leverage [such as] cloud computing and low cost manufacturing to allow us to build a product that is cutting-edge and innovative but also till low-cost that we can actually get this into the hands of Deaf-blind people,” Johnson said. “As a team, we’re always discussing about how we can make a really cool $100,000 robot arm—but that doesn’t help anybody either. We need to make sure that we fit into grant programs [and] into government assistance programs that from this, at the end of the day, we’ll be able to access it easily. We’re really looking forward to leveraging advancements in a lot of these spaces to improve our product, and are really excited to continue getting feedback as we build more partnerships in the Deaf-blind community, as well as more partnerships on the manufacturing side, to hopefully see this in the homes of Deaf-blind people as we move forward.”
