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futurity_sci_tech 00298.txt

#Vibrating glove could teach you Braille A new wireless computing glove can help people learn to read and write Braillend they don even have to be paying attention. he process is based on passive haptic learning (PHL), says Thad Starner, professor at Georgia Tech. ee learned that people can acquire motor skills through vibrations without devoting active attention to their hands. In a new study, Starner and Phd student Caitlyn Seim examined how well the gloves work to teach Braille.""One big question, looking forward, is what makes children more flexible learnersre they just free from the preconceptions that adults have, or are they fundamentally more flexible or exploratory in how they see the world?""Each study 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 predetermined phrase in Braille. Audio cues let the users know the Braille letters produced by typing that sequence. Afterwards, everyone tried to type the phrase one time, without the cues or vibrations, on a keyboard. Participants played a game for 30 minutes and were told to ignore the gloves. 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. hose in the control group did about the same on their second attempt (as they did in their pre-study baseline test), Starner says. ut participants who felt the vibrations during the game were a third more accurate. Some were even perfect. Starner had created previously a technology-enhanced glove that can teach beginners how to play piano melodies in 45 minutes. He and Steim expected to see a wide disparity between the two groups based on the results of the piano glove study. But they were surprised the passive learners in the Braille study picked up an additional skill. emarkably we found that people could transfer knowledge learned from typing Braille to reading Braille, Seim says. fter the typing test, passive learners were able to read and recognize more than 70 percent of the phrase letters. No one in the study had typed previously on a Braille keyboard or knew the language. The study also didn include screens or visual feedback, so participants never saw what they typed. They had no indication of their accuracy throughout the study. he only learning they received was guided by the haptic interface, Seim says. Seim is currently in the middle of a second study that uses PHL to teach the full Braille alphabet during four sessions. Of the eight participants so far 75 percent of those receiving PHL reached perfect typing performance. None of the control group had zero typing errors. PHL participants have also been able to recognize and read more than 90 percent of all the letters in the alphabet after only four hours. Nearly 40 million people worldwide are blind. However, because Braille instruction is neglected widely in schools, only 10 percent of those who are blind learn the language. Braille is also difficult to learn later in life, when diabetics, wounded veterans, or older people are prone to lose their sight. The Braille studies will be presented in Seattle this September at the 18th International Symposium on Wearable computers (ISWC. The National Science Foundation provided partial support for the study. Any conclusions expressed are those of the principal investigator and may not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF r

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