August 17,2009
via ScienceDaily
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.
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Posted
Aug 26 2009, 02:52 PM
by
BusyBee