Evaluation of emotional expression using finger braille

Finger Braille is one of the tactual communication media utilized by deafblind people. Deafblind people who are skilled in Finger Braille can understand the speech conversation and express various emotions. Because there is such a small number of non-disabled people who are skilled in Finger Braille, deafblind people communicate only through an interpreter. The objective of this study is development of a Finger Braille support device which assists not only verbal communication but also non-verbal (emotional) communication between deafblind people and non-disabled people who are not skilled in Finger Braille. In this paper, we evaluated the emotional expression by non-disabled people by applying the emotion feature vectors and their distances. The results showed that the range of the distances of intra subjects represented the degree of the emotional expression by the subject; the distances of inter subjects represented the similarities of the emotional expression by the two subjects.