Handheld Idea for people with visual impairments - Inspired by looking at early handheld devices

In previous blog posts I have looked at the historic lawsuit battle which took place over a number of years about who invented the first handheld personal music playing device.

 

I started to think about the different concepts for handheld devices. I thought about what handheld devices where available on the market. Mp3 players, handheld TVs, handheld media players which play all types of available media - images, music and video, palm sized digital radios, Palm PCs, minidisk players, some cassette players are still available and mobile phones.

 

I focussed on mobile phones and thought about the availability of these devices. These devices seemed to be worldwide and available to most people. Prices ranged from £10 to £300 and above for new models. I thought the spectrum of availability to users of mobile phones was pretty gargantuan but the major brands did not seem to consider those with disabilities too much or even not at all.

 

I then had a 'eureka' moment in a lecture where we did group work. We discussed ideas. We then discussed handheld and mobile devices. Then I quipped what about a mobile phone for blind and visually impaired people.

 

We discussed this issue and how we could tackle it with what senses visually impaired people rely upon and we used this to our strengths when brainstorming a device.

 

We narrowed it down to 3 senses which we could optimise to use in our device idea:-

Touch, hearing and smell. 

 

Touch

 

The use of a Braille keypad. 

The concept of stylus device alongside a touch screen where the user could perform actions which made functions on the phone happen.

The handle on the device fitted for gripping so it would not fall out of the users hand too easily.

Vibrations, a certain pattern of vibrations when different operations have been performed, e.g. an error or an incoming call the vibration patterns would be different.

 

Hearing

 

The use of screen reading software for navigating SMS, phone internet or menu navigation.

Voice recognition e.g. say a persons name and the phone calls that person.

 

Smell

 

This option seemed outlandish at first but when discussed with our lecturer (Diana Xu), she informed that some interactive devices release odours for different operations. I brainstormed this concept and how it could be used in our device, a good example I came up with would be for different smells for different operations on the phone e.g. your mother calls you and you get an odour released which smells like her cooking, or bread baking, you do a wrong operation on the phone and a bad smelling odour is released. These odours could be added by a cartridge of some sort inside the phone.

 

I then went on to try and design how the device would look in Photoshop. This image will be seen in my next blog post.