Teaching of Emotional Expression Using Finger Braille

Finger Braille is one of the tactual communication media utilized by deaf blind people. Deaf blind 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, deaf blind 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 deaf blind people and non-disabled people who are not skilled in Finger Braille. In this paper, to develop an emotion teaching system, we developed a teaching method of emotional expression (neutral, joy, sadness and anger) using the sentences about the impression of emotional expression. The results of the evaluation experiment showed that the non-disabled subjects could change the dotting durations and finger load by the teaching of emotional expression.