Engineering an Electromagnetically Actuated Refreshable Braille Technology
From: Medical Design Technology - 11/17/2014

Harvard alumna Katie Cagen, finalist in national Collegiate Inventors
Competition, works to advance accessible technologies

When Katherine (Katie) Cagen '14 was applying to Harvard, she made a new
friend on campus who happened to be visually impaired. "I saw how much she
relied on technology to be able to access her course materials," says Cagen.
"Spending time with Sally made me realize that there's this whole other world
out there of adaptive technology."

For her capstone design project at the Harvard School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences (SEAS), Cagen invented a device she calls Ferrotouch. It is
a tactile display technology that uses electromagnetically actuated materials
to create a sort of "refreshable Braille."

Actually, refreshable Braille machines already exist; they use pins to
display a changing message. But they cost so much, Cagen quips, "a Tweet
would cost you about sixteen grand." Instead, having taken a course on
applied electromagnetics, she fabricated her own electromagnets and arranged
them underneath a layer of ferrofluid, a colloidal suspension of iron
nanoparticles. Under the magnets' influence, the ferrofluid forms bumps that
the user can feel through a layer of elastic.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.mdtmag.com/news/2014/11/engineering-electromagnetically-actuated-refreshable-braille-technology

Links:
Refreshable Braille gets an engineer's touch
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2014/11/refreshable-braille-gets-engineers-touch

Ferrotouch - Testing With Membrane (video 0:08)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtEiWVCaN2M

Ferrotouch - Pixel Testing 2 (video 0:34)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YU3boYUBKA