Creating New Tactile Sensations for Tactile Aids with Designer Materials - PROJECT SUMMARY For blind people, visual aids like a graphic or a plot are not accessible. Instead, tactile aids are used help render abstract concepts through an arrangement of physical features, like bumps, lines, and textures. Although useful, static tactile aids cannot easily render many abstract concepts and still face difficulties when displaying large amounts of information. A key issue with displaying dense, complex information is that using too many lines or bumps in a small space creates “tactile clutter”, leading to confusion and misinterpretation by the user. In fact, the ability of tactile aids to render information by touch is practically at full capacity. While fabrication costs are lowering with emerging technologies, the core technology of using patterns of bumps and textures to render information by touch has largely remained the same. Most current research is not focused on addressing this fundamental limitation and instead sidesteps by using other senses instead, like audio. Therefore, there has been little progress in tactile stimuli generated by a tactile aid, which has limited their ability to make complex information accessible for blind people. To address the lack of methods to create tactile sensations in static tactile aids, this research will increase the variety and density of tactile sensations by using “designer materials”. Designer materials, unlike physical features like bumps and lines, are surface coatings which use phenomena from surface chemistry to control adhesion and friction and thereby generate new tactile sensations. By relying on surface chemistry, it is possible to exert a level of control and spatial resolution not currently possible. Designer materials will be combined with current physical features to build the next generation of easier-to-read and more information dense tactile aids. These tactile aids will be demonstrated in a series of everyday activities with blind subjects. This project combines our team’s expertise in material science, solid mechanics, human psychophysics, and tactile aid development. Our project is centered around the discovery of new designer materials, developing next generation tactile aids, and mechanistic studies into the optimal design of tactile aids. Together, these areas allow us to rapidly iterate new tactile aids, build rationale guidelines for designing traditional and next generation tactile aids, and provides a much-needed expansion in the toolkit for tactile aid developers. To maximize impact, all aspects of the project involve close collaboration with members of the blind community.
