[Missouri-l] FW: [VICUG-L] new braille displays in the works!

[Peter Altschul]

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Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles

 

Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles
Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles

 

Research with tiny artificial muscles may yield a full-page active Braille
system that can refresh automatically and come to life right beneath your
fingertips.

 

Yosi-Bar Cohen, a senior researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, Calif, was inspired during a business trip to Washington, D.C.,
where
a convention for people with visual impairments was taking place.

 

Bar-Cohen came up with an idea to create a "living Braille," a digital,
refreshable Braille device using electroactive polymers, also known as
artificial
muscles. He wrote up a technology report and included information in a
related book that he published. His writings inspired other scientists and
engineers
to create active displays using this technology, and prototypes are now
under development around the world.

 

"I hope that sometime in the future we will have Braille on an iPhone. It
will be portable and able to project a picture of a neighborhood popping up
in
front of you in the form of raised dots," said Bar-Cohen. "A digital Braille
operated by artificial muscles could provide for rapid information exchange,
such as e-mail, text messaging and access to the web and other electronic
databases or archives."

 

According to the World Health Organization, about 314 million people are
visually impaired worldwide; 45 million of them are blind.

 

Recently, Bar-Cohen was contacted by the Center for Braille Innovation of
the Boston-based National Braille Press to reach out to the Electroactive
Polymer
community and take advantage of his role in this field. The National Braille
Press is a non-profit Braille printing and publishing house that promotes
the literacy of blind children through Braille.

 

Current Braille Display Technologies

 

The challenge for creating an active Braille display is in packing many
small dots into a tiny volume.

 

Unlike hardcopy Braille, a refreshable display requires the raising and
lowering of a large number of densely packed dots that allow a person to
quickly
read them. Currently, commercial active Braille devices are limited to a
single line of characters. A full page of Braille typically has 25 lines of
up
to 40 characters per line. Characters are represented by six or eight dots
per cell, arranged in two columns. To produce a page of refreshable Braille
using electroactive polymers requires individually activating and
controlling thousands of raiseable dots.

 

Developing New Braille Technologies

 

Some of the leading-edge work in Braille technology was developed at SRI in
Menlo Park, Calif. Richard Heydt, a senior research engineer there who was
involved
in developing a prototype says, "The electroactive polymer technology seems
to be a natural fit for Braille and tactile display applications."

 

The Braille display developed at SRI is based on activating a type of
polymer consisting of a thin sheet of acrylic that deforms in response to
voltage
applied across the film. The individual Braille dots are defined by a
pattern on this film, and each dot is independently activated to produce the
dot
combinations for Braille letters and numbers.

 

In currently available active refreshable Braille displays, each dot is a
pin driven by a small motor or electromagnetic coil. In contrast, in the SRI
display
the actuators are defined regions on a single sheet of film. Thus, while
each dot is raised or lowered by its own applied voltage, there are no
motors,
bulky actuators, or similar components. Since the system has far fewer
discrete components for a Braille dot array, it would be potentially much
lower
in cost.

 

"The contributions of the developers of electroactive materials to making a
low-cost, active Braille display would significantly improve the life of
many
people with visual impairments, while advancing the field to benefit other
applications" said Bar-Cohen.

 

Looking for the 'Holy Braille'

 

The Boston-based National Braille Press has recently established a Center
for Braille Innovation. They're looking for the "Holy Braille," a full-page
electronic
Braille display, at a low cost.

 

"We feel that the exciting field of electroactive polymer technology has
matured to the point where it can provide real solutions for Braille
displays.
We welcome and encourage anyone who wants to take part in Braille
innovation," said Noel H. Runyan, National Braille Press, Center for Braille
Innovation

 

In the spring of 2010, Bar-Cohen is including a special session on tactile
displays at an SPIE conference. SPIE is the international society for optics
and photonics. Tactile displays will be presented and possibly demonstrated
at the conference. He hopes these baby steps may someday lead to a full-page
Braille system that will allow people to feel and "see" the universe beneath
their fingers.

 

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena.

 

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