Analysis of prosody in finger braille using electromyography.
Finger braille is one of the communication methods for the deaf blind. The interpreter types braille codes on the fingers of deaf blind. Finger braille seems to be the most suitable medium for real-time communication by its speed and accuracy of transmitting characters. We hypothesize that the prosody information exists in the time structure and strength of finger braille typing. Prosody is the paralinguistic information that has functions to transmit the sentence structure, prominence, emotions and other form of information in real time communication. In this study, we measured the surface electromyography (sEMG) of finger movement to analyze the typing strength of finger braille. We found that the typing strength increases at the beginning of a phrase and a prominent phrase. The result shows the possibility that the prosody in the typing strength of finger braille can be applied to create an interpreter system for the deafblind.
Miyagi
Manabi
M
Graduate Sch. of Sci. & Technol., Chiba Univ., Japan. miyagi@graduate.chiba-u.jp
Nishida
Masafumi
M
Horiuchi
Yasuo
Y
Ichikawa
Akira
A
D001766:Blindness; D003638:Deafness; D004576:Electromyography / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D005385:Fingers; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009068:Movement; D011932:Reading; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012682:Sensory Aids; D014110:Touch