Chroma haptic system enabling color cognition for the visually impaired

As human sight corresponds to the maximum amount of sensory data consumption with respect to visual information input. The loss of visual cognition is a great loss in terms of “data lost in acquisition/transit”. Amongst other things, the loss of chromatic or colour data is a considerable loss for the visually impaired subject. This paper proposes a novel approach towards enabling the cognition of colours for the visually impaired users. It is done as a practical approach towards fulfilling multiple practical applications. This elusive goal is achieved by virtue of creating a family of 16 basic colours based on the CGA palette and converted to families. These colour families in turn are mapped to a glove with micro tactile vibration actuators mapped to the fulcrum points of the joints of each finger of one hand (total 15 actuators). Each finger corresponds to a colour family and its intensity is mapped on its respective finger joints based vibrators. Thus providing a very intuitive and least neural load based colour cognition. All the computation happens on a smart device which is wirelessly connected to the glove and a camera that translates the live input image and pre-processes the image into 16 colour palette based “blobs” which when overlapped by the hand, sends equivalent vibration signals to the glove, enabling an instantaneous access to colour data and that too very naturally.