Multimodal Collaborative Handwriting training for Visually-Impaired People

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Summary

In this paper the author presents a Multimodal Haptic feedback system for visually impaired people to help them learn writing and drawing shapes. The system is called "McSig". In this paper the author discusses the general un-awarness of people that blind people find it really hard to draw and write because of lack of feedback.

In this paper the author creates a system which enables teachers to make the students learn how to draw and write through a sketch-based system. In this setting the teacher draws a shape on a tablet pc and then the student can feel explore and move around the shape on a device called PHANTOM which echoes the shape the teacher had drawn. PHANTOM is an omni force-feedback device.

An evaluation study was conducted on two types of visually impaired subjects. Once which are completely blind and the other who are partially visually impaired. There was a significant improvement in the accuracy of the shapes drawn by both type of subjects. The partially impaired subjects were able to learn the system very quickly and after a very short time they were able to draw shapes accurately. The completely blind subjects took more time in learning the system but once they got used to the devices they also showed improvement in their sketching.

Discussion

A different domain of the usability of sketch systems through haptic feeback. There is lot of discussion on the effective feedback of sketch systems and this paper simply opens a new dimension of providing richer feedback.