FingerReader Helps Blind “Read”

Back in 1829, Frenchman Louis Braille came up with a tactile system that was capable of letting those who suffered from vision impairment to “read” books using the tips of their fingers, that was what we know today as the Braille system. The Braille system comprised of a series of raised dots, as the finger trails over a line of braille text, where the reader would interpret it in the same way a sighted person is able to read using ordinary letters. The thing is, Braille can be pretty tough to understand and master, and there are still plenty of reading materials that have yet to get a braille edition. Having said that, MIT researchers intend to circumvent this situation by rolling out the FingerReader, a new piece of wearable device that can both read books out loud to those with vision problems and aid for language translation.

The FingerReader is worn around your finger as a ring, where you can then follow a line of text in a book or on a screen. It has a camera which is capable of looking at the text and recognizing it, where the ring will then scan a text line and will give an audio feedback of the words.

The FingerReader’s software knows to detect and give feedback when the user veers away from the baseline of the text, and helps them maintain a straight scanning motion within the line.

The FingerReader is still in its prototype stage.

Source: Ubergizmo