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- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Hi, my name is Sile O’Modhrain. I’m an associate professor at the University of Michigan.
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: Hi, this is Alex Russomanno, and I’m a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Michigan and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
WADE WINGLER: Hi, this is Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals crossroads in Indiana with your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up-to-date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs.
Welcome to episode number 247 of Assistive Technology Update. It’s scheduled to be released on February 19 of 2016.
Today my guests are Dr. Shile O’Modhrain and Alex Russomanno both of the University of Michigan. They are on the search for the “Holy Braille”. They are working on development of a full-page refreshable braille panel which is a big deal in the industry of assistive technology. Also we’ve got a story about connected autonomous vehicles for people who are older. We’ve got an extended session with Audrey Bush talking about federal developments in the world of assistive technology as it relates to the federal budget, legislation, and those kinds of things.
We hope you’ll check out our website at www.eastersealstech.com, shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project, or call our listener line, give us some feedback. That number is 317-721-7124.
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Questions, I got them, you’ve got them. Let’s face it, we’ve all got questions. If you’ve got assistive technology questions, you should check out our new show ATFAQ, assistive technology frequently asked questions. Search for ATFAQ wherever you get your podcast.
If you listen to the show for very on, you know I tend to get excited about self-driving cars and what that might mean for folks with disabilities. There is a group of researchers over at the University of West England in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and they are doing some fascinating research with people who are older and experience in the effects of aging, challenges with cognition and reactive times and vision and all that kind of stuff. The interesting thing about this research project is that they have developed a pod. The project is called Flourish, and this is a pod driving similar simulator that seems to expressly measure the disability factors of the aging population. We see videos of self-driving cars that are sort of designed for every man, people who don’t have disabilities, typically developing normal vision, and those kinds of things. They sort of hint around that these might be great for people who might have disabilities.
This group is very specifically looking at the needs of older drivers. What does reduced vision mean? What does it mean to be able to transfer in and out of an autonomous car? What are some of the cognitive things that might be involved in an autonomous car if you do have trouble with understanding or memory or those kinds of things? I’m excited because it is the first I’ve seen anybody say more than, yeah this would be great for folks with disabilities, but it seems like they are very specifically talking about the interface elements that are specific to age related visibility.
It’s quite an extensive article and is produced out of the University of West England on their blog. It has some photographs of the technology and a lot of quotes and information about the researchers who are looking at the security and human factors, engineering, and usability of the simulator. I would encourage you if you’re at all interested in self-driving cars or autonomous vehicles to check out our show notes and follow the link over to this piece that comes to us from the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. The headline reads “Connected autonomous vehicles promise travel freedom for older adults in the future.”
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It’s time for On the Hill with Audrey. Audrey Busch is the Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Association of Assistive Technology Act Programs. In her update, she lets us know how the power of politics is impacting people with disabilities and their use of assistive technology. Learn more about Audrey and her work at ATAPorg.org.
AUDREY BUSCH: This is Audrey Bush, Policy Director and Advocacy Director for the Association of Assistive Technology At Programs, coming to you with your mobile monthly Washington update. This month the president released his final Fiscal Year 2017 budget proposal. It is safe to assume that this budget release went unnoticed by most of the nation as it practically got no play on any of the news networks. The New Hampshire primary certainly stole the show. It is also a sign that this year’s budget proposal from President Obama was not met with great anticipation by the nation or the Republican Congress. With this being the president’s last year in office, and a Congress controlled by the opposite party, many called the budget release dead on arrival.
The president’s budget argues for $4 trillion in spending, 25 percent of which is discretionary for domestic and military programs, leaving the rest to mandatory spending which Congress has no say over basically. So it is no surprise that the Republican Congress grimaced. Not only is this a Democratic budget in a presidential election year, and the Republican Congress is playing their politics of course, but also it represents that age-old fight over death deficit spending.
The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Mike Enzi, a Republican from Wyoming, stated, “This budget joins President Obama’s others by placing America on a fiscal path that is unsustainable and threatens our long-term economic growth.” Clearly Republicans are messaging to the public that this budget does not address the long-term fiscal debts of our nation.
So what is in this budget that deserve such great disdain? Well, to reiterate, the majority of the budget is spent on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. The other quarter of the budget, the discretionary portion, is what Congress actually controls each fiscal year and debates. The president’s budget proposal makes no attempt to modify the entitlement programs which are claimed to be draining the nation from fiscal solvency. Entitlement programs are the constant elephant in the room that has not been addressed by either party for many years.
Regarding the discretionary part of the president’s budget proposal, it was a bit vanilla, so to speak, for most disability advocates who saw their programs merely level funded. While advocates have grown used to receiving level funding in actuality, advocates like to see lofty, generous increases in the president’s budget proposal because the president is able to dream a little bit in the first step of the budget process in Washington. While there was some dreaming on the president’s behalf this year, it just did not include many disability programs.
What it did include was a $1 billion cancer moonshot initiative led by Vice President Joe Biden intended to eliminate cancer as we know it. There were also proposed increases to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, preschool grants, and the Infant with Families program of which $15 million was proposed to expand screening, referrals, and intervention services for infants and toddlers with learning and developmental delays. There was also a small increase provided for the Section 811 program at the Department of Housing and Urban Planning which subsidizes developments that provide a platform for disabled persons to live independently in integrated community settings. As for the Assistive Technology Act, it was level funded at $32 million.
It is important to note that the president’s budget proposal is just that, a proposal. The budget process has just begun and is far from being over. Congress is now working to assemble, deliberate, and pass 12 separate appropriations bills that may or may not adopt some of the president’s priorities. This year, Congress will move quickly to develop their budget for Fiscal Year 2017 given they wrap up their legislative section around the July 15. Now that the president has picked out the appropriation season with his budget, it is time for advocates in Congress to take the wheel. That means all voices need to be heard on Capitol Hill, and it’s is certainly time for disability advocates to get educating and advocating for funding for key disability programs in FY 2017.
We look forward to speaking to you in the future months about the progress of making a FY 2017 budget and where disability programs fit into that, so stay tuned.
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WADE WINGLER: So for anyone who has worked in the real world of assistive technology and braille, you know that there is this white buffalo or unicorn thing. People for years, generations maybe, have been looking for a full page refreshable braille panel. It has been elusive and people have talked about the expense of it, but nobody disagrees that it is important. In fact, when I was in grad school, I did some research on refreshable full page braille panels myself, and I guess I was engaged in the search for the Holy Braille at that point. I’m excited today to talk about the search for the Holy Braille, a full-page refreshable braille panel. I’m joined today by Doctor Sile O’Modhrain and Alex Russomanno who are both at the University of Michigan. Sile is an associate professor of information at the school there, and Alex is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I am joined by them today on the line. Dr. O’Modhrain and Alex, how are you today?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: Doing well.
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: I am well, thank you.
WADE WINGLER: Thank you so much for coming in. I’m excited. I have to say I’m excited to talk to you guys today about the search for the holy braille. I get a smile on my face every time I say that. It is kind of a big deal. But I do know that there are some people in my audience who aren’t familiar with refreshable braille at all and kind of why it is important. Sile, I thought I might ask you to give us a little bit of an overview. What is refreshable braille in general? Why do we care? Why is it important? and maybe how is it different from paper-based braille that our listeners might be a little more familiar with?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Refreshable braille really just refers to a braille display that can be updated instantaneously by information, usually digital information from some source whether it is from a notetaker or from online content. The braille display itself is typically one lined, often either 20 or 32 or 40 characters. They read a piece of text one line at a time effectively. But for the delivery of books, online content, things like that that, they are really in an efficient way to get information and braille.
WADE WINGLER: The state of technology today is one line, limited number of cells, right? There’s nothing that is currently doing full-page braille that is commercially available?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: No. There are a number of products like ours in development, but all of them are very expensive, even the single line braille displays very expensive. Most of your listeners were fully with the technology will know that even 32 cells are 20 cells of braille is going to set you back a couple of thousand dollars. That’s only half a line of what someone would see on a screen. There is an existing full-page braille display being developed in Europe, but it costs about $56,000. It is not going to be something we will be rushing out and buying tomorrow.
WADE WINGLER: You can buy that or a Tesla, right?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Pretty much.
WADE WINGLER: Why is full-page braille so hard to create? Why is it so expensive?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: It is hard to create because it’s very hard to find a way to move dots up and down individually and pack the things that move the dots up and down tightly enough to get a whole page of braille. That’s been the challenge, and that of course is the thing we are trying to overcome in this project. I know others are trying to do the same. The reason it is important to do that is because a lot of content is not conducive to being spoken. It is not easy to speak math equations, and it is impossible to speak things like like music notation. So all of these things, I think people want to get access to in digital form, but they are very hard because it is either through speech or on the single line of braille.
WADE WINGLER: In the traditional systems, there are solenoid motors under each dots, little piezoelectric response units and those kinds of things, so there is tons of little moving parts on the existing system. Is that right?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: I can talk a little bit more about that. You mentioned one of the issues is the technology that goes into these devices. It is fairly archaic and it’s been around for decades. You threw out the word piezoelectric so essentially you have these materials that, when electronic energized underneath the display, can deflect and cause the pins to move up and down. But the problem is these materials are bulky and require assembly. So to make any more than a single line is not really possible to do cheaply. That’s kind of where we come in and a couple of other teams come in trying to figure out new technologies separate from piezoelectric that are capable of raising dots on a surface.
WADE WINGLER: So the system you’re working on, how is it different? What is it doing differently that’s going to revolutionize the industry?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: The basis of our technology is using air pressure, fluid pressure, to essentially create bubbles on a service. What we do is if you have a very small cavity and you put a thin membrane over it and you pressurize that cavity, the membrane will deflect A Board on the service and you should be able to feel that or maybe that can be used to drive a pin up and down. That’s the basis of our technology. What’s different about it in terms of piezoelectric is you can actually pack these features in much more tightly. I talked before about how these materials in piezoelectric fit right below the display and right below the pin, so it is very hard to get them closely packed together. With air pressure you can create very small channels separate from the point that the dots are being moved up and down. So you can get thousands of features into a very small area, an actuator turn them on and off of a larger distance away from those points. It enables you to create a larger display.
WADE WINGLER: With traditional braille cells, my experience has been we are talking about six or eight actuated bumps in plastic or whatever that are raising up and down, and they are squeezed into maybe a half inch or a little less in terms of space. Your system, we are not talking about just traditional braille cells, right? We are talking more tightly than that.
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: It would be feasible to make the spacing much more closely on braille. Right now our main focus has been on braille spacing, and we have been able to achieve that. But you can imagine the way we manufacture these, we could go to a smaller spacing and you might be able to focus more on something that is conducive to tactile graphics as opposed to braille.
WADE WINGLER: What is a state of the project now?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: I like to talk about it kind of we have been working in parallel on two technologies which are needed. One I talked a lot about already, and that is the actuators themselves, making bubbles on a surface that will be able to move up and down pins. The other is you have these thousands of features on the surface, how do you control them individually? How do you address each one of these bubbles individually to tell them to move up-and-down? That’s really one of the difficulties because every bubble that you add to the surface, you need some sort of control feature, whether that is a valve or something to control air pressure. On one side of things, like I talked about earlier, the bubbles, we have been able to do that fairly quickly. We got that part down and were able to raise features with bubbles. Now we are working on the control of those.
One way, and I kind of mentioned, would be to use electronic valves. We are kind of steering away from that and are implementing a technology called microfluidics. Essentially all of that means is that we are moving fluid through very small or micro-channels to the point of actuation or a bubble on the service. Kind of the key to that is when we do build these things, we build them kind of in a molding fashion, so that you can create thousands of these features all at once. It’s very cheap to create thousands of features. Essentially you have these complex networks of channels built in to the same substrate as the bubbles that you’re creating that enables you to control those features individually.
That’s kind of the current state. On one side we have these bubbles that we are able to move up-and-down. We are working on the technology and we’ve got the proof of concept of the technology that is needed to control those bubbles. We are in the state of trying to combine those two things together to create a refreshable braille display.
WADE WINGLER: When you envision a commercially available product down the road, is it going to be like an iPad where you have a full display and the entire thing will be bubbles so that you can make raised line graphics or braille cells? What does a commercial product look like down the road?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: I think what we are envisioning is something like a total surface like something like an iPad. But it would be covered in dots. I should say that although Alex has been describing bubbles, the bubbles he’s been describing are driving pins. From the point of view of the finger, the display really does feel like a series of traditional braille pins at the moment. We have changed the spacing slightly. We have added an extra row and column so that we can do simple graphics so the dots are equally spaced. The initial product if it were to come into being in its current form would be something like a slightly wider spaced braille with the possibility of doing simple graphics.
The way I like to think of it is what we are essentially doing is developing the equivalent of what might be the technology in an LCD screen, creating the features and the way to control of features. The next step would be for a manufacturer to figure out how to build that into the product. While we would love to see it in a reader like a Kindle or iPad or something where you could literally read across the surface in an integrated product, of course that depend on what happens to the product when we get to the point where it can be integrated.
WADE WINGLER: You are a braille user yourself, is that right?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Yes.
WADE WINGLER: How is the responsiveness and the crispness of this? My friends who use braille always talk about displays needing to be responsive and crisp. How does this stand up in its current state?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: In terms of the bubbles rising up, it actually feels very similar to traditional displays. We do have quite a lot of work to do because once we start making big arrays, then we have to start thinking about timing and refresh rates and things like that. So the crispness is good. The responsiveness is something that is going to involve modeling the behavior of a much bigger system and actually figuring out how to weigh different pros and cons to get the right kind of refresh rate that will be functional. That’s the next stage. Once things are all integrated, then testing with users, figuring out what people will tolerate, what the trade-offs are in the system, that’s where we will go next. A long-term dream of mine is that this would be integrated with touch input so that, similar with cursor routing, you could actually press on this display so you have a totally integrated experience similar to a touch screen but with a refreshable braille display. We haven’t integrated that yet, but that is where one could see the technology going.
WADE WINGLER: That totally makes sense because if it is a bubble, a very tightly controlled bubble, you could measure the pressure in the bubble and know if someone is putting down on it, right?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Or we can integrate some other techniques in and around the bubble to figure out where your finger is. Finger sensing is really cheap these days.
WADE WINGLER: Interesting. I’ve got a million questions but one of the ones that has popped in the top is what about software to drive it? Obviously you guys are working on the mechanics of it, but is this long-term something that will just be an install option for a screen reader? With it have some sort of more specific proprietary software to drive it? We are talking about something that is very new here. I’m having a hard time wrapping around my brain around what the software will be like.
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: We are not going to go to the stage where we design of the product is. Our goal is to make it as available to as many different developers as possible. It’s like an LCD. You don’t want one manufacturer to be able to make LCDs, although that is probably what happened initially. Ultimately you would like several people to take this thing and build it in the products in different ways. The software to drive it would very much depend on the product it was built in to.
WADE WINGLER: I know I’m asking questions that are very futuristic. But any productions on when this technology will become commercially available? What the cost might be? How is a battery life going to be? How long will it last week those kinds of things. I know that my listeners will want to know that kind of stuff and probably a lot of that might be nebulous. What kind of things are you thinking along those lines?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: I think my response is we are far out. We just have a little bit of ways to go yet. It’s hard to answer some of these questions. I like to say and have been saying recently that in the next year, we will have a much better idea of these questions and hopefully be able to answer them in more detail once the technology moves along a little bit more. I know that is kind of a teaser but that’s where we are out right now.
WADE WINGLER: I see that as an invitation for me to call back in a year or so and see where you guys are with this and talk more about this. It’s fascinating.
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: We would be happy to.
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: We will be here.
WADE WINGLER: We have got just about a minute left in the interview. I’m going to ask one more question and we will close it out. As you guys look into the future in your crystal ball, what does an ideal device look like when it comes to the Holy Braille? After some of these questions are answered and you have a device in your pocket, not what it will look like, but tell me the features? What does an ideal refreshable full-page braille display look like in the future?
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: What I dream of, whether it is possible or not, is something about the size of an iPad, probably a bit thicker, that can allow me to do pretty much what you can do on a standard tablet device these days which is go online, surf, but would also be a reader so I can actually have braille or braille music which is something I use a lot. Or even some simple graphics that might display stats about my football team that I like. These will be things I think will be possible. That would be something you carry around with you. It could be possible then to use it to read anything off the Internet like the Holy Grail of Google books for instance. Things like that. All of the things I think down the line are what one would dream of. And then of course things like iPads come with cameras where we could scan stuff and read it.
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: I think something as well – and maybe Shile touched on it a little bit – it would be incredible to have a technology that would change the way braille and tactile information is communicated. Who knows what is possible once you do have a full page of refreshable braille. There may be whole new modes of communication much like sighted people have access to icons and we interact with a whole interface on a computer. A similar thing might be possible with these new kinds of displays. That is also very exciting and something to look forward to.
WADE WINGLER: I agree. I’m interested to follow along and see what happens with this. If folks in my audience are interested in learning more or following up with you, or reaching out to you, do you have a website or contact information you’d like to provide?
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: There is a website. We are part of the Haptix Lab at Michigan. Brian Kolespi is the head of that group. You can find information for me and him on there.
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: I have my own webpage which is somodhrain.com. That’s my own webpage. Under projects this particular project is listed at the top.
WADE WINGLER: I will pop your website into the show notes so that people can go there, to it. Alex and Sile, thank you so much for being on our show today. We are excited about what you’re doing. I’m going to take advantage of calling you back in a year or so, or ask you to keep me posted as we had developments on the store, because I really do think that it is important and I’m impressed with the work you are doing. I know the folks in my audience will wants to learn more. Thanks again for being on the show today and keep up with your search for the holy braille.
ALEX RUSSOMANNO: Awesome. Thanks for having us.
- SILE O’MODHRAIN: Thank you.
WADE WINGLER: Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? Call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Looking for show notes from today’s show? Head on over to EasterSealstech.com. Shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject, or check us out on Facebook. That was your Assistance Technology Update. I’m Wade Wingler with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indiana.
