A Multifunction Braille Trainer Based on Embedded Systems, Mobile Apps, Rule-based Reasoning and Data Mining for Children with Visual Impairment

Abstract

According to latest estimates of the World Health Organization (WHO), now a days there are 285 million people visually impaired world wide: 39 million are blind, 246 have low vision, and 19 million are children. This situation becomes more complex in developing countries because the local governments and families do not have enough resources and assistive technologies to improve the literacy programs of blind people. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an integral low-cost tool to support the learning process of Braille code at schools or homes. The novelty of our proposal is that it relies on a multi-layer architecture that provides the following functionalities: support to carry out reading and writing exercises using a single device, an interactive interface for designing and monitoring classroom activities through an approach based on data mining and rule-based reasoning, and a mobile application to interact with the system easily. Our proposal has been evaluated in a pilot experiment by 20 persons: 7 (blind) teachers that work with visual impaired/blind children, and 13 persons with normal vision. The results achieved during the evaluation of our proposal are encouraging: 90% of participants agree with the usefulness of the system as well as the high potential of including the tool in classrooms.