Analysis of awareness while touching the tactile figures using near-infrared spectroscopy

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to measuring how the blind to touch the tactile images using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). The tactile image is one of powerful tool to give any visual information for the blind. On the other hand, it is difficult to estimate the process that the blind has understood the tactile images because the only trajectories of the hand are too vague to identify when the blind know the target image. Some experimental results insist that the brain is strongly activated at beginning of a task rather than the process of the task. Then, NIRS is confirmed to be useful to analyze process of understanding tactile figures by touching. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.