Vibrating gloves can teach Braille in MINUTES: Motors attached to knuckles help the brain remember complex touch patterns
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Learning to read Braille - the tactile writing system used by people who are blind and visually impaired - is notoriously difficult.
To make this a little easier, researchers have designed vibrating gloves that help people learn to read and write Braille with minimal effort.
Vibrating motors at the knuckle of each finger in the gloves buzz to tell a wearer to press a corresponding key, and the system tells them which letter they are typing.
Life could get a little easier for visually impaired people as scientists from Georgia Tech have created vibrating gloves (pictured) which have help them learn to read Braille more easily. The process is based on a technique known as passive haptic learning, and means wearers can learn Braille even if they're not paying full attention
And the gloves even teach the wearer when they are not paying attention.
'The process is based on passive haptic learning (PHL),' said Thad Starner, a Georgia Tech professor who is also the technical lead on Google's Project Glass.
'We've learned that people can acquire motor skills through vibrations without devoting active attention to their hands.'
Professor Starner and PhD student Caitlyn Seim put the gloves to the test to examine how well this technique can be used to teach Braille.
Each participant wore a pair of gloves with tiny vibrating motors stitched into the knuckles.
The motors vibrated in a sequence that corresponded with the typing pattern of a pre-determined phrase in Braille, while audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence.
Nearly 40 million people worldwide are blind, but because Braille (stock image pictured) lessons are widely neglected in schools, only 10 per cent of those who are blind learn the language
THE GLOVE EXPERIMENT
Scientists at Georgia Tech stitched tiny vibrating motors into the knuckles of each finger in the gloves.
When one of the motors vibrates, the wearer presses a corresponding key and the system tells them which letter they are typing.
The gloves were tested on people who had never learned Braille before.
After an initial lesson, participants were distracted for 30 minutes by playing a game and half of the participants' gloves kept buzzing so they kept learning passively. This technique is called passive haptic learning.
People wearing the gloves that kept buzzing made 30 per cent less errors than those who did not benefit from the passive haptic training.
They could read 70 per cent of a Braille phrase when tested, compared to those whose training stopped during the game, who could only read 22 per cent.
After the lesson, the participants tried to type the phrase without the cues or vibrations on a keyboard.
The sequences were then repeated during a distraction task, when participants played a game for 30 minutes.
Half of the participants felt repeated vibrations and heard the cues, while the others only heard the audio cues.
When the game was over, participants tried to type the phrase without wearing the gloves.
'Those in the control group (without the repeated lesson from the gloves) did about the same on their second attempt as they did in their pre-study baseline test,' said Professor Starner.
'But participants who felt the vibrations during the game were a third more accurate. Some were even perfect.'
The researchers expected to see a wide disparity between the two groups, but they were surprised the passive learners picked up an additional skill.
'Remarkably, we found that people could transfer knowledge learned from typing Braille to reading Braille,' said Seim.
Wearers of the buzzing gloves could read 70 per cent of a Braille phrase when tested and others were typing perfectly after four hours of lessons. Pictured are prototypes with PhD student Caitlyn Seim. The technology has previously been used to teach beginners how to play simple piano melodies in just 45 minutes
HOW PASSIVE HAPTIC LEARNING CAN HELP YOU PLAY THE PIANO
Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) allows people to learn 'muscle memory' through vibrations without devoting attention to the stimulus.
PHL can be used by wearable computers such as gloves with an embedded tactile interface.
Two years ago, Georgia Tech scientists used vibrating gloves to teach people how to play the piano while learning everyday tasks - an example of PHL.
In the 'mobile music touch' glove set-up, users wore the vibrating gloves to learn a tune.
The song being learned was loaded onto a user's mobile phone and was played as they went about their business.
As each note was played, the glove tapped the finger corresponding to the appropriate key on a piano keyboard.
In as little as 30 minutes, users of the gloves and the PHL technique learned the 'muscle memory' of the first phrases of the song, even though their attention was devoted to another task.
'After the typing test, passive learners were able to read and recognise more than 70 percent of the phrase's letters.'
No-one in the study had previously typed on a Braille keyboard or knew the language.
The study also didn't include screens or visual feedback, so participants never saw what they typed. They had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study.
'The only learning they received was guided by the haptic interface,' she said.
Seim said that six out of eight participants who have tried to learn the full Braille alphabet during four one-hour lessons since, have achieved perfect typing using the gloves.
Participants can also recognise and read more than 90 per cent of all the letters in the alphabet after just four hours.
Nearly 40 million people worldwide are blind, but because Braille lessons are widely neglected in schools, only 10 per cent of those who are blind learn the language.
The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC).
Scientists at the university have previously used the glove to teach beginners how to play simple piano melodies in just 45 minutes.
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