In this paper, to achieve the goal of aiding the blind and visually impaired (BVI) to read any text not written in Braille, a custom-built, finger-wearable, and electro-tactile based Braille reading system with its Rapid Optical Character Recognition (R-OCR) method is developed. The R-OCR is capable of processing text information in real time using a miniature fish-eye imaging device mounted at the finger-wearable system. This allows real-time translation of printed text to electro-Braille along with natural movement of user's fingertip as if reading any Braille sign or book. An electro-tactile neuro-stimulation feedback mechanism is further proposed and incorporated with the reading system, which facilitates a new opto-electrotactile-feedback-based text line tracking control approach that enables text line following by user's fingertip during reading. Extensive experiments were designed and conducted to test the ability of blindfolded participants to read through and follow the printed text lines based on this optoelectrotactile-feedback method. The experimental results show that as the outcome of the opto-electrotactile-feedback, the users who involved in the feedback loop were able to maintain their fingertips within a$2mm$distance of the text while “reading” through a printed text line. Our work is a significant step to aid the BVI users with a portable means to read any printed texts to Braille through the following and the translation, whether in the digital realm or physically, on any surface.

SUMMARY: The need for an efficient and cost-effective method is compelling in biomolecular NMR. To tackle this problem, we have developed the Poky suite, the revolutionized platform with boundless possibilities for advancing research and technology development in signal detection, resonance assignment, structure calculation and relaxation studies with the help of many automation and user interface tools. This software is extensible and scalable by scripting and batching as well as providing modern graphical user interfaces and a diverse range of modules right out of the box. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Poky is freely available to non-commercial users at https://poky.clas.ucdenver.edu. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

This study is designed to validate the feasibility of generating identifiable moving patterns using electro-tactile stimulation. An electro-tactile display is built using an array of 16 contacts to deliver the electrical signal to the fingertip skin. This signal can have varying voltages, frequencies or duty cycles to form the most comfortable sensation. Moving patterns can be generated by individually or collectively switching on or off the contacts on the display. This is done to stimulate a moving pattern. In this case, a moving pattern is comparable to a group of frame-by-frame pictures constructing a movie. Similarly, by toggling the contacts in a specific order, a moving pattern can be achieved. A program on a single-board computer (Raspberry Pi) was used to control and generate 6 different patterns. These patterns are delivered to the display and consequently to the fingertip skin of the participants. A total of 8 subjects participated in this study. They filled a questionnaire to indicate the corresponding movement. The results of these experiments were analyzed and a conclusion regarding the direction of the movement was drawn. It became clear that the direction of the movement had a significant impact on the recognition of the patterns.

A pixel-by-pixel scanning that is usually performed by a single point-like sensor or probe is being widely used in the applications such as scanning probe microscopy techniques. Typically, their scanning time is several seconds to minutes long due to a raster scanning that needs to be conducted for capturing every single point on the surface of the sample area. To improve the scanning efficiency, recent research has been focused on investigating effective scanning patterns and methods. This work presents an adaptive local scanning method for efficiently sampling indiscrete objects like string-like one-piece connected objects under the microscopy. An initial scanning pattern is firstly investigated. Once the initial scanning reaches the object, an adaptive sinusoidal scanning method that can on-line adjust its scanning frequency and amplitude by predicting both the curvatures and the shape of the object is employed. The method also addresses scanning intersections and bifurcations associated with objects. Based on extensive implementations, it is validated that our method has high performance as it has high scanning efficiency and the scanned results match objects with high precision and high accuracy.