Blind people can now navigate buildings more easily. Still, reading texts in braille requires training and a highly developed sense of touch.
According to a Chinese research team, however, this role could soon be performed by a digital pen. The team developed a soft, thin film with an embedded fibre optic sensor, which uses light to feel.
Like human skin, the sensor changes shape when passed over the contours of the braille characters. The changes alter the light frequency in the sensor. Different frequencies were assigned to different letters, numbers and punctuation marks.
By using neural networks to process the data, characters were decoded in real time with 98.57% accuracy. In future, AI could help decode more complex texts.
