COMPANY SEES MEMS AS SOLUTION FOR AFFORDABLE BRAILLE DISPLAYS
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
the American Foundation for the Blind's magazine, AccessWorld.
"Too many people have to opt for just speech output. This would mean
the Braille device could compete with the speech device, and that
would increase literacy."
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.
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.
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