A third eye with human-computer interaction for the visually impaired

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compeleceng.2017.03.023Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A new device was developed for visually impaired people.

  • A blind person can read any document with his hands using this device.

  • The device is ergonomic, portable, vocalizable, refreshable and multi-functional.

  • The device's weight, cost and size features are too good.

Abstract

In order to reduce dependency of the visually impaired people on others resulting from their visual impairment, an ergonomic, portable, vocalizable and refreshable Braille reader was developed. Texts from a scanned document or any text imported from a computer are transmitted to the device developed, enabling visually handicapped persons to read a text in the Braille format by using their hands. Some innovations were made in this study with a view to further reduce the size of the previously developed circuit and to lower the cost. The circuit for charging the device and the keypad for the button circuit were redesigned. A new circuit was created for the panels which enables data transfer to the Braille cells. The newly developed device has a reduced size by 57.94%, the cost of device development is cut by 40% and the weight of device has been reduced by 33.3%.

Introduction

Persons who have lost sight disability are called as visually impaired individual. These people often need other people's help because they do not have a sense of sight. Some products have been developed in the hardware and software fields so that these people who need special care can continue their lives. These products; cane, talking clock, kitchen scales, screen reading programs, recorders, Braille printers, etc. The common feature of these products is that they transfer to visually impaired individuals by voice and use them with Braille alphabet. The Braille alphabet is an alphabet that is developed for visually impaired individuals.

The Braille alphabet was developed in 1829 by Louis Braille. The Braille characters are represented with 6 dots in total while they consist of 2 columns and 3 rows. Current commercially available Braille displays use 8 dots instead of 6 dots to perform cursor functions. The Braille alphabet contains a total of 64 characters. When the PC became widely used, a refreshable Braille display was needed, and the answer is by using actuators to control the convex or flatness of Braille dots [1]. A Braille display comprises both mechanical and electronic parts for displaying a line of Braille codes [2].

Actuators are usually utilized in order to enable each Braille cell to write different characters. Apart from actuators, several electronic circuit elements can also be used. Some of those include; polymer actuator [3], [4], elastomer actuator [3], [5], piezoelectric actuator [3], [6], flapper actuator [2], [3], micro bobin actuator [3], [7], bistable electroactive polymers [3], [8], [9], pneumatic balloon actuators [3], [10], field-effect transistor and polymeric actuators [3], [11], relay [3], [12], [13], electro-mechanically [14] etc.

With advancements in computer technology, new applications featuring human-computer interaction are being developed [15]. In this study, a document reader which comprises 96 Braille cells and has various functional features for the visually impaired people has been developed. The visually impaired person can read the document at that moment with this device. Characters obtained from Optic Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms after any document is scanned or characters derived from any document stored in a computer are transmitted to the Braille cells, enabling a visually impaired person to read by using his hands. The device's Braille display section consists of 2 rows, each containing 48 Braille cells. The device also enables visually impaired people to listen to any text sent from a computer through USB or Bluetooth. Fig. 1 shows a diagram of the device developed.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, operating logic of Braille cells and panels are explained. Our proposed method and developed electronic circuits are described with details in Section 3. Finally, we discuss the results in Section 4.

Section snippets

Material and method

The Braille display developed for purposes of this study uses electronic circuit elements called piezo actuators. Besides, it uses panels attached to each Braille cell in order to energize the corresponding pins in a Braille cell, i.e. to ensure movement of the pins which should move upwards in the Braille cell when a character is sent from the computer.

Application

In this study, any document is scanned with a scanner and characters in the document are obtained via image processing. In addition, characters found in any digital document stored in a computer can also be sent to the device to be read by using the device developed. For connection, USB and Bluetooth are provided as choices to send the characters obtained to the device developed. The connection type is selected at the user's discretion. After the connection type is decided, the characters

Conclusion

In this study, a reader was developed in order to end difficulties experienced by the visually impaired people in reading digital and printed texts. During each stage of the device development, the visually impaired people were involved, thus ensuring the circuit to become functional in a more robust and consistent way. 25 visually impaired individuals were tested the device. 3 staff helped the visually impaired individuals during the use of the device. They checked that the correct characters

Acknowledgments

This study is supported by TÜBİTAK with Project number 113E778 and by Selcuk University Scientific Research Projects (BAP) Coordinatorship with Project number 14401107.

Fatih Başçiftçi is an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering Department at Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. in Electric Electronic Engineering at Selcuk University. His research interests include logic functions, electronic circuits, reduced rule based algorithms.

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Fatih Başçiftçi is an Associate Professor in Computer Engineering Department at Selcuk University, Konya, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. in Electric Electronic Engineering at Selcuk University. His research interests include logic functions, electronic circuits, reduced rule based algorithms.

Ayşe Eldem is a lecturer in Computer Technology Department at Karamanoglu Mehmetbey University, Karaman, Turkey. She is PhD student in Computer Engineering at Selcuk University. Her research interests include image processing, electronic circuits and fuzzy logic.

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