Thermal tablet for the blind

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims present a thermal touch screen for the blind – a thermal tablet. A blind person using the device can imagine simple graphics or characters by touching flat thermal screen, which consists of reversible heat points, either warm or cold in different time. For the purpose, a thermal touch screen has been designed, fabricated and tested with a help of the blind. Design/methodology/approach – The screen contains 294 Peltier modules working as reversible small heat sources that keep pre-set different temperature. The tablet can easily present thermal images and characters generated directly by an interfaced PC. Design methodology is based on own authors’ patent. Findings – This paper presents original design and construction stages, as well as tests and usefulness of the device. The tests were carried out with participation of blind students who suggested how to tune the final parameters of the device in such a way that presentation and recognition of thermal information is easy and quick. Originality/value – The thermal tablet consists of original hardware and software. Both of them collaborate each other and make the tablet useful for the blind. It has been proved by series of tests.

The Terrain of Digital Touch Communication

“…Since the information processing capabilities of the tactile sense are lower than vision, haptic alone has been shown not to always be sufficient (Levesque 2005), leading designs to augment tactile displays with audio e.g. Talking Tactile Tablet (Wells and Landau 2003), or thermal screen, with varied temperature generated by the embedded LED bulbs, that allows a blind person to paint colourful pictures on the tablet (Kos et al 2016).…”