Smart Gloves From Georgia Tech Can Help You Learn Braille Even If You Aren’t Paying Attention

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a smart glove that can help people read and write Braille script even when they are not paying any attention. The gloves are based on the principle of passive haptic learning. In this learning process, vibrations help a subject gain motor skills even when they are distracted by another task. Researchers attached tiny vibrating motors into the knuckles of a pair of gloves. These motors were programmed to vibrate in a sequence corresponding to the typing pattern of a Braille phrase. Audio cues let the users know what Braille letters they were typing. Once this procedure was complete, the participants were asked to type the phrase they had learned without any audio cues or vibrations.


In another test the vibration sequences were repeated while the participants were playing a game for 30 minutes. They were asked by the research team to ignore the cues from the gloves. Once the 30 minutes were over they were asked to repeat the sequence without wearing the gloves. The researchers were amazed to find that even while distracted their answers were almost accurate and some even managed to achieve a perfect score. People who were part of the test had never used Braille script before and yet most of them were able to read and recognise 70 percent of the script after the test.

This isn’t the first time Georgia Tech has used the principle of passive haptic learning. In the past they had designed a glove that helped people learn how to play a piano. In another project they had employed the same technology in a glove to improve sensation and mobility for people with spinal cord injury.

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