IIT Kanpur team develops touch-sensitive watch for visually impaired

The user has to touch and scan the touch-sensitive watch’s hour indicators and with the help of different vibration patterns, the watch communicates back the time information that is easily perceived by the user. This way, the person is able to read the time.

A professor and a research associate at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur has come up with a novel touch-sensitive watch for the use of visually impaired people to sense time accurately.

“The watch we have developed is a haptic watch with a tactile interface that makes it easy for the visually impaired people to read the time easily. The watch has tactile hour indicators of different shapes that make it easy for the visually impaired people to recognise them,” claims prof Siddhartha Panda of IIT-K who developed it with Vishwaraj Srivastava, a research associate at the National Centre for Flexible Electronics, IIT Kanpur.

“The user has to touch and scan the touch-sensitive watch’s hour indicators and with the help of different vibration patterns, the watch communicates back the time information that is easily perceived by the user. This way, the person is able to read time,” the professor said. The institute has applied to get it patented.

“As there is no need for audio feedback, this watch will provide privacy of use. Also, one of the advantages of this watch over a standard mechanical watch is that unlike the mechanical needles present on that watch, this watch has no moving parts,” prof Panda said.

“Our entire watch surface is one sturdy tactile surface and thus there is no fear of breaking the needles while touching the watch,” he added.

Presently, there are some watches available for the visually impaired. The current mechanical watches were not user-friendly. The user has to feel the needles of the hour hand and minute hand to know the time. “Also, as there are moving parts (i.e. these needles), there is a scope of breakage. Another available option is to watch with audio feedback. Again, there could be privacy issues with an audio output. So, we realised that there existed a need for a user-friendly, silent and sturdy watch,” Bharadwaj said.

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