[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles

[Steve Pattison]

*** forwarded from Menvi mailing list. ****

Braille Displays Get New Life With Artificial Muscles


ScienceDaily (Aug. 17, 2009) - 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.

Regards Steve
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