  Visually impaired people are neglected from many modern communication and
interaction procedures. Assistive technologies such as text-to-speech and
braille displays are the most commonly used means of connecting such visually
impaired people with mobile phones and other smart devices. Both these
solutions face usability issues, thus this study focused on developing a user
friendly wearable solution called the "BrailleBand" with haptic technology
while preserving affordability. The "BrailleBand" enables passive reading using
the Braille language. Connectivity between the BrailleBand and the smart device
(phone) is established using Bluetooth protocol. It consists of six nodes in
three bands worn on the arm to map the braille alphabet, which are actuated to
give the sense of touch corresponding to the characters. Three mobile
applications were developed for training the visually impaired and to integrate
existing smart mobile applications such as navigation and short message service
(SMS) with the device BrailleBand. The adaptability, usability and efficiency
of reading was tested on a sample of blind users which reflected progressive
results. Even though, the reading accuracy depends on the time duration between
the characters (character gap) an average Character Transfer Rate of 0.4375
characters per second can be achieved with a character gap of 1000 ms.
