Haptic Technology Teaches Blind Kids How to Write
From: Medgadget - 03/16/2011

University of Glasgow professor Stephen Brewster has developed a method
involving haptic technology that helps teach blind children to write.
Brewster has developed McSig, a force-feedback pen that helps blind children
write by gently guiding their hand. The system uses Phantom Omni, an
off-the-shelf haptic device, which includes a stylus mounted at the end of a
motorized arm that can move and resist movement in three dimensions. "The
device can guide or constrain certain types of movements, so as the teacher
draws on a touchscreen the movements are echoed directly back to the student,
allowing the student to feel the movements and learn the letter shapes,"
Brewster says. In addition to the visually impaired, Brewster wants to help
other people as well. "My research is in multi-modal interaction, which is
all about combining the different senses to use computers or access
information, the idea being that the more ways of interacting that you can
provide, the richer the data," he says. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2011/03/haptic_technology_teaches_blind_kids_how_to_write.html
http://www.wellsphere.com/general-medicine-article/gadget-that-helps-blind-children-write/1384817

Links:
Force-feedback pen helps teach blind children to write
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sectors/electronics/news/force-feedback-pen-helps-teach-blind-children-to-write/1007874.article#ixzz1HHKvWtCi

Stephen Brewster
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/contacts/search.cfm?rowid=93
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen/aboutme.shtml

Multimodal Interaction Group
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~stephen

Human Computer Interaction Research Group
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/research/index.cfm?resgroup=HCI

McSig
http://www.slideshare.net/crossana/mcsig-chi-2008

Writing with Feeling
http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/features/headline_191623_en.html

Multimodal collaborative handwriting training for visually-impaired people
http://www.mendeley.com/research/multimodal-collaborative-handwriting-training-visuallyimpaired-people/