World’s first Braille smartwatch ‘Dot’ has been designed by the South Korean engineers. This watch includes bumps that change their position up and down to make different patterns for different words that can be read by blind just like a Braille. Creator hopes that this can help a lot in the education of the blind and it would be priced only at $300.
For someone who is bestowed with sound eyesight, it is hard to comprehend the everyday difficulties faced by the visually impaired or blind to perform simple tasks such as reading a book. Despite the development and evolution in the smartphones, these people are unable to take benefit of these new technologies. Now, South Korean engineers have come to the rescue of such people by designing what they claim as to be the World’s first Braille smartwatch.
The smartwatch alerts the user about the incoming text messages with vibrations. Until recently, the iOS Siri had this feature that when it received a message it read it out to you in its own voice. However, according to the Eric Ju Yoon Kim who is the CEO of the company that designed DOT, this feature is impersonal. It is much better if the visually impaired user can read it like a Braille using the changing sequences of the bumps. In fact, these bumps are the four rows consisting of six dots. which move up and down to represent four letters at a time.
The speed of the change of words can be adjusted according to to the reading speed of the user from 100 words a second to as low as one word a second.
This smartwatch comes with many useful feature it can help read text messages from the Bluetooth apps like iMessage by converting them into braille letters. When fully charged it can last for as long as five days. It can also give directions to the destination. This smartwatch can also be used as an e-reader. The braille e-reader currently available in the market are prohibitively expensive as they are priced around $2000 and 99 percent e-books are not in the braille format. This can help in the education of the blind as there are 285 million visually impaired in the world.