Sensing Performance of a Vibrotactile Glove for Deaf-Blind People

Abstract

This paper presents a glove designed to assess the viability of communication between a deaf-blind user and his/her interlocutor through a vibrotactile device. This glove is part of the TactileCom system, where communication is bidirectional through a wireless link, so no contact is required between the interlocutors. Responsiveness is higher than with letter by letter wording. The learning of a small set of concepts is simpler and the amount learned can be increased at the user's convenience. The number of stimulated fingers, the keying frequencies and finger response were studied. Message identification rate was 97% for deaf-blind individuals and 81% for control subjects. Identification by single-finger stimulation was better than by multiple-finger stimulation. The interface proved suitable for communication with deaf-blind individuals and can also be used in other conditions, such as multilingual or noisy environments.

Assistive Technology to Promote Communication and Social Interaction for People With Deafblindness: A Systematic Review

“…The above-mentioned articles were categorized as qualitative research. Five articles (Evers et al, 2012;Ozioko and Hersh, 2015;Russo et al, 2015;Carrera et al, 2017;Vasanth et al, 2018) received a score of 2 as the focus of these studies was on the design and technical evaluation of the communication assistive technology, but not on examining their potential effects among deafblind users. The article by Sorgini et al (2018) is a review on haptic sensory substitution technologies and therefore did not receive a quality appraisal.…”

“…All studies, except the review (Sorgini et al, 2018), received a TRL score (see Table 2). In five (Ozioko and Hersh, 2015;Russo et al, 2015;Carrera et al, 2017;Vasanth et al, 2018;Ozioko et al, 2020) studies, the assistive technologies were placed at level 1,2,3, and 4-indicating that either concept formulation, proof of concept and validation was still taking place in lab situations,…”

“…The overarching themes included: 1 The communication assistive technologies were developed with a specific communication partner in mind. These partners included peer-to-peer communication (Emerson and Bishop, 2012;Russo et al, 2015;Ozioko et al, 2020) and unimpaired persons (Emerson and Bishop, 2012;Ozioko and Hersh, 2015;Carrera et al, 2017;Vasanth et al, 2018;Cantin et al, 2019). Some assistive communication technologies were able to provide communication with several types of communication partners (Emerson and Bishop, 2012;Evers et al, 2012).…”

Special Issue on Wearable Computing and Machine Learning for Applications in Sports, Health, and Medical Engineering

“…The second paper, 'A Biomechanical Study for Developing Wearable-Sensor System to Prevent Hip Fractures among Seniors' authored by G. Shan, X. Zhang, M. Meng and B. Wilde, introduced a wearable system that can prevent hip fracture by triggering a mini-airbag prior to fall events [5]. Lastly, 'Sensing Performance of a Vibrotactile Glove for Deaf-Blind People' authored by A. Carrera et al, introduced a vibrotactile glove that can assess the viability of communication between a deaf-blind user and his/her interlocutor [6].…”

Vibrotactile Display of Flight Attitude with Combination of Multiple Coding Parameters

“…Recently, favourable effects of vibrotactile displays on navigation performance, situational awareness, and workload reduction have been shown in many application, such as vehicle driving, guiding blind people, and particularly in the high workload group [13][14][15][16][17]. To date, very few studies have examined the implementation of vibrotactile displays for conveying flight attitude information of aircraft.…”