The broader impact/commercial potential of this project consists of providing a new means for visually impaired people to understand information via haptics. In order to accomplish this, the company is creating micro actuators and refreshing displays that will permit the blind to understand visual information quickly. One major potential societal benefit will be directly related to visually impaired people and blind, who have a marked difficulty in learning geometry, algebra and calculus, and other visual disciplines. Tactile Analogics? devices are intended to help them to understand such concepts by representing shapes/ forms in a fast-refreshing tactile way, helping to overcome that learning obstacle. Furthermore, the commercial success will be in producing and selling such devices (for different market sub-segments). Tactile Analogics expects market adoption of 37% of USA blind students, 90% of blind educational centers, 40% of museums, and 7% of blind adults to use it in as a working tool. In collaboration with Sharp, Tactile Analogics will explore also a functional digital display with micro-valves embedded, the market will widen to give haptics experience to mobile users in a 2-sense data outputs via sight and tactile means. The company expects to generate revenues of over $200m after year five of production. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is attacking the problem that visually impaired people have to not just learn, but to understand images and visual information, with impacts on their quality of daily life. Current cost of producing a single pinned printed page is about $20 USD per page and takes about 2 weeks to prepare and print. Tactile Analogics? devices will offer a rapid fast-refreshing speed of up to 30 times per second, allowing the creation of frames according to the image that they are representing. This solution will enable blind to not depend on pinned paper to understand images or shapes. In general, this is a haptic way to retrieve information and technically not limited to blind people. The opportunity is related with providing a new type of information retrieval where sight is not needed. The research objectives are to overcome design problems of our proven technology of micro-valves, where Tactile Analogics would be able to offer a standard tablet-size display for an area of 15cm by 20cm (2700 pneumatic valves). Furthermore, the air chamber and the information conversion-actuator manipulation are two other problems to overcome. The anticipated results are the allocation of not just the 2700 pneumatic micro-valves, but also even for larger displays. Once the technology is proven, it will allow a variety of applications across multiple industries, with the possibility of creating many commercially successful product lines.
