1. A lip reading sensor system comprising: a capacitive array comprising a plurality of non-contact proximity-detecting capacitive sensing array pairs having an array output representative of the movement of a user's lips or facial features, first electronic circuitry for receiving and processing of the array output into a sequence of signal data sets having a predetermined frame rate, a first electronic memory for the receiving and storing of the sequence of signal data sets, a second memory for storing at least one reference data set representative of at least one predetermined set of acoustic signals, and, second electronic circuitry for comparing at least one of the signal data sets with at least one of the references data sets.