Design of a Vibrating Fiber Display for a Wearable Low Vision Aid

There are over 14 million people in the United States who are classified as ‘low vision’, with visual acuity no better than 20/40 with best correction in their best eye. Of these, over 3 million are classified as ‘legally blind’, with visual acuity no better than 20/200 with the best correction in the better eye [1]. All of these people suffer from an inability to perform some or all of the simple daily tasks that the majority of ‘normal sighted’ people take for granted. These include, but are not limited to, navigating in- and outdoors; reading a newspaper or medicine bottles; recognizing faces. Helping as many of these people as possible perform these tasks is a daunting task, and requires an interactive system capable of extracting pertinent data from the environment, enhancing the data, and then presenting it to the user in a form that is well understood and relevant to the user’s task. A lightweight, small, inexpensive, and bright display device with a large field of view and high resolution is a key component of such a system.