Robotic pen guides the hand of the blind
The system uses an off-the-shelf “haptic” device called the Phantom Omni – a stylus mounted at the end of a motorised arm capable of moving, and resisting movement, in three dimensions.
In the experiments, a teacher first wrote a letter on a touch-sensitive computer screen using a normal pen. The motion required to produce this letter was then re-enacted by the Phantom while the pupil held the stylus, giving them a sense of how to move a pen to produce the letter.
In addition to haptic feedback, the system offers audio cues, with stereo sound panning to the left and right as the pen moved horizontally and the pitch increasing and decreasing with forward and backwards movement
From newscientist.com
