Methodology for Use of Mobile Phone Vibration as an Alternative to Vision in Perceiving Colours

With the help of active sensory organs viz. eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin, living beings perceive the environment around them. Humans exhibit a sense of self learning since birth and the sensory organs play a vital role in the learning process. For those unfortunate, who lose any of the sensory capability, try to sense the environment through other sensory organs available. Such persons are called differently-abled. Those with loss of sight are called visually impaired. There are a few passive devices to augment the partially defunct senses such as spectacles, hearing aids etc. While these devices help boost existing senses they do very little for those with complete absence of the sense. Present day technological advances have opened a galore of possibilities in designing solutions to provide learning support to perceptually disabled. Multimedia computers and hand held devices can be effectively used to find new solutions. This paper presents a novel approach for the use of vibrations of a hand held mobile phone, as an alternative to vision in helping the visually impaired persons in perceiving things especially colours. The authors have developed an android mobile phone application to prototype the methodology to use mobile phone's motor as the source for vibration and mapping a vibratory pattern with colours. With mobile phones being widely used, the authors find this approach as a potential solution in designing applications to assist the visually impaired in their learning process.