Development of Vibro-Tactile Braille Display and Keyboard

Visually impaired people worldwide suffer from many difficulties related to their access to and exchange of information, which constitutes a major obstacle and threat to their study and social life. In recent years, scientists have worked to find new technologies that help the blind people and facilitate their access to and exchange of information. In this paper, a novel vibro-tactile braille display and keyboard device is presented. The developed device is an electronic Braille reading/writing device allows blind people to read textual information in Braille language and facilitate their typing/writing process on computer. For displaying textual information in Braille language, six vibro-tactile actuators are used to represent/code Braille cell of each single character. The device provides fast and accurate mnemonic output by concurrently vibrating the users' fingers of both hands based on the pattern of character. The designed keyboard got inspiration from the conventional Perkins Braille writer which 6-dot codes are inputted by using the user's hand finger chords. The developed braille keyboard/display improves and simplifies the communication for visually impaired people based on their sensation of vibration which is suitable for blind people who has low tactile sensation (e.g. due to diabetes). The developed device provides high privacy for users and with high compatibility to computer environment.