High-tech gloves can teach you Braille even if you're distracted
It looks like a team of Georgia Tech researchers is in the business of making wondrous, high-tech gloves -- their most recent one, for instance, can teach you Braille even if you're doing something else. Similar to the piano-teaching glove they designed years ago, this new pair has vibrating motors on each knuckle that buzz in different patterns to correspond with preset Braille phrases. To test how well the gloves work, they asked volunteers during an experiment to play a game for 30 minutes while the motors buzz along with audio cues. When the subjects typed the phrases after half an hour, the researchers found their answers to be mostly accurate, with some even getting perfect scores.
Even better, the subjects, who've supposedly never studied Braille before, could not only type random phrases after the test, but also read and recognize some Braille letters. As with any new technology, the researchers are still conducting more tests, but the gloves have a huge potential to help with teaching more blind people the language. The wearable might also make it easier to learn Braille (something that'll take years to master) for those who lose their sight later in life.
