Being blind means you can still communicate through sound, being deaf means you can rely on sign language and reading to interact with others. Being deaf and blind severely limits your communication options to just touch.
Deaf-blind people mainly rely on the Lorm alphabet and tactile signing for communication, which requires physical touch on a hand with another person. That means using a device like a phone is impossible simply because there isn?t that physical interaction. However, a new glove being developed at the Design Research Lab, located at the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and Technical University in Berlin, aims to change that.
It is called the Mobile Lorm Glove and allows for translation of Lorm alphabet input into digital text, and vice-versa with text translated into the Lorm alphabet. The user can input a message via the pressure sensitive pads on the glove, which then gets translated into text and transmitted via Bluetooth to a smartphone. That message can be sent as a text message, email, or turned into audio output (eventually). An incoming message will be turned into vibrotactile digital Lorm text after being sent to the glove, again via Bluetooth. It is ?read? to the glove wearer using the vibration motors mounted on the back.
The glove is still a prototype, but already looks very promising in opening up communication to deaf-blind people beyond the limitations of physical interaction. It will also allow access to different types of information due to the translation ability of the glove. So, surfing the web, reading a digital book, or translating audio should be possible in the future, with direct speech input and output being the next stage of development.
More at the Design Research Lab, via Phys.org
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