Most individuals at the moment depend on know-how to navigate by means of the world. That’s sensible because of the reliability of recent GPS. However receiving instructions will be troublesome for folks with sure disabilities. People who find themselves blind, as an illustration, can’t take a look at a map on a smartphone. Folks with lacking limbs might not even have the ability to maintain a smartphone. To assist these folks, Rice College engineers have developed a light-weight wearable machine that makes use of pressurized air to offer instructions.

As an alternative of displaying a graphical map, this machine signifies to the person when they need to make a flip. It does so by means of pneumatic haptic suggestions. The digital parts connect to wearable textiles, so it’s out of the way in which. Pneumatic hoses run from the machine to nozzles pointed on the person’s pores and skin. The areas of these nozzles will be tailor-made to go well with the person’s preferences and physiology. When the machine must alert the person, corresponding to when a flip is arising, it can open a valve to the suitable hose so air blows on their pores and skin.

The Rice engineers designed a prototype to check this idea consisting of two haptic textile sleeves built-in right into a shirt together with a belt-mounted circuit, which makes use of an Arduino Nano board for management. The Arduino opens the solenoid valves by means of MOSFETs and it receives instructions from an exterior machine, like a pc, through a four-channel 433MHz receiver. Air comes from canisters of compressed CO2 by means of a stress regulator.

In testing, topics have been in a position to appropriately interpret the pneumatic haptic suggestions 87% of the time.