By Allen Bernard
Small Times Correspondent
April 9, 2002 — Development of a MEMS-based Braille display system may prove to be a miracle worker for the thousands of blind people unable to access information via computer.
In fact, Orbital Research Inc.’s computer display could actually raise literacy rates among the blind by making Braille displays more affordable.
“At a much reduced price, that would be a huge advantage,” said Jay Leventhal, editor of
 |
| Orbital Research Inc. uses pneumatic MEMS microvalves that inflate balloons of air to form the points of Braille characters. The result: A refreshable Braille display system. |
By packaging an existing technology, electrostatically actuated MEMS microvalves, that has been around since the 1980s in a new, more compact way, Orbital expects to lower the price of a Braille display from today’s $70-per-cell cost to somewhere around $5 to $10 per cell, according to Fred Lisy, corporate vice president of Cleveland-based Orbital. A cell is the equivalent of one character, letter or number. At the same time, the company expects to dramatically improve the reliability, usability and functionality of the devices.
“Microvalves have been around for a while,” Lisy said. “The problem is when it came to packaging these devices in a reliable way, that’s where things fell apart.”
The reduction in cost would allow an average person to purchase a display that has many more rows and columns than today’s displays, and may eventually display graphics. And, as a side benefit, by increasing literacy rates, Orbital would also be increasing the market for its displays.
“It’s a big advantage to have Braille,” said Leventhal, who, on recent trip to Los Angeles had to decide what reading material to take by literally weighing it. If a refreshable display were available that could be used with his laptop, for example, he would no longer have to go through this exercise every time he went out of town. “(Blind people) would use more Braille if they could.”
At $5,000- to $7,000 each, most displays are well out of reach of the average blind person. Even less functional Braille PDAs, which show five to 10 words at a time, run between $3,500 and $5,000 and are useless for surfing the Internet or adding numbers on a spreadsheet.
“Current technology is almost like closed captioning,” said Marlene Bourne, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR, “you really only get one line at a time. Theirs seems to be a real intriguing advancement in concept. From what I understand, it can go beyond computers to being used in cell phones, pagers; any type of electronic communications device.”
Existing displays depend on little electric relays pushing little plastic pins against an elastic membrane to form the Braille character. What Orbital has done is replace the piezoelectric actuators with pneumatic MEMS microvalves that inflate bladders, or balloons, of air to form the points of the Braille characters.
This gives Orbital’s devices some distinct advantages over today’s displays. They can work at any angle, in contrast to piezo displays, which make use of gravity to drop the pins back into place; they are more power efficient, and, because up to 16 microvalves can be packed into a space the size of a microchip, more rows and columns can be put in one display. The next goal is getting 24 valves into this same space.
Although the worldwide market is only about $20 million per year, Orbital believes it can capture almost 5 percent of it within 24 months of shipping product. To do this, the company is looking to partner with one or all of the five California-based Braille display manufacturers that control about 50 percent of the market. If the company can convince these manufacturers to use its technology it will make its numbers. If not, it still expects to capture most of the market over time.
But Orbital is still a startup, even though it’s been around for 10 years. While not quite standing around with its hand out, Orbital has been depending on government funding, primarily through the Small Business Innovative Research program and the U.S. Air Force, to stay alive while it develops uses for its new MEMS packaging technology. If the Braille display device takes off, the company will have a revenue stream around which it can continue to develop the other eight or so products it has in the pipeline.
“We are R&D. That’s our strength. To make the thing successful we don’t have the wherewithal internally for commercializing, for setting up the small scale manufacturing to create these Braille modules,” Lisy said.
Lisy is also in talks with a bank and Diebold Inc., which manufactures automatic teller machines, about using Orbital’s display technology in a new generation of ATM machines.
But, in order to cash in on its newly minted Braille display patent, which was issued in March, Orbital is in the process of licensing its MEMS microvalve technology — for which it has found at least three other uses — to a spin off company called iACTIV.
In this way, Orbital can attract VC money for its MEMS work while protecting its other discoveries, which will still be owned by Orbital Research. It’s a paper division, but an important one if the company wants to capitalize on 10 years of research.
Related News
MEMS could help the blind see, UCLA scientist tells conference
null
Reprints of this article are available here.