While our smartphones are able to cater to the visually impaired through accessibility features, they probably weren’t designed for the blind to begin with. However it seems that over in India, an innovator by the name of Sumit Dagar has come up with what seems like the world’s first Braille-based smartphone designed specifically for the blind. Dagar’s company is currently being incubated in the Center for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship and apparently it took them about 3 years to come up with this concept.
Obviously instead of featuring a regular display which would serve zero purchase for the blind, this Braille-based smartphone will instead sport a technology known as Shape Memory Alloy. This is based on a concept that metals can remember their original shapes even after being expanded and contracted. Underneath this “display” will be a grid of pins which will move up and down to form various Braille characters or numbers as required. The prototype has been met with great response although there is no word on when it will become commercially available, but it’s still a pretty awesome concept nonetheless.
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