A Portable Braille Refreshable Display Using Micro Servos

The visually impaired community suffers from an immense disadvantage in academic sector. They are also not up to speed with the staggering development of technology and portable devices. To solve this issue, the area of braille technology has been widely explored since its inception. Refreshable braille display is a small step towards the advent of smart braille devices. In this paper a single cell refreshable braille display model has been proposed that is based on micro servos, as opposed to solenoids, lead screw actuation etc., to formulate different patterns of braille symbols, each representing an alphanumerical value or a contracted word. Many existing refreshable braille displays perform outstandingly, however, it is the portability, simplicity and the cost efficiency of the proposed model that contribute to the novelty of this study. A prototype of the proposed model has been built to conduct an experiment to showcase the efficiency, cost analysis and portability analysis of the system. The results show that the presented model can be a better choice in simplified and cost effective refreshable braille display implementations.