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Vibrating Braille cell phone developed in Japan

Saturday, 05 April 2008

A former teacher at a school for the blind and a professor from Tsukuba University of Technology have developed a cell phone that sends out vibrations representing Braille symbols to enable people with sight and hearing difficulties to communicate.

The phone, reportedly the first of its kind in the world, was created by 73-year-old former teacher Sadao Hasegawa, Tsukuba University of Technology professor Nobuyuki Sasaki and other developers.

"This should be a big help for blind people who find it difficult to communicate," said Hasegawa, who is totally blind.

When a caller pushes numbers on the keypad corresponding to Braille symbols, two terminals attached to the receiver's phone vibrate at a specific rate to create a message.

Japanese Braille uses six dots to represent the Japanese syllabary. Using the numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8, on cell phones to represent these six dots, it's possible to form Braille symbols.

The development of the cell phone follows previous research into Braille using vibrating terminals to express syllables. Usually the dots in Braille are only a few millimeters apart from each other, and it is difficult for many people to recognize them with their fingers, even if they know how the dots are supposed to be aligned.

If devices that convert information from the keypad movements into vibrations are set up with the phones, the users can have a conversation. Pushing the number 1, for example, causes the left terminal to give one long vibration, which is the syllable "a."

The developers are now working to make the devices that convert keypad information into vibrations smaller than their current size (16 centimeters by 10 centimeters). If vibration-based Braille is applied more widely, it may enable information to be "broadcast" to several blind people at once.

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