Development of Teaching Method 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. 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, to develop an emotion teaching system, the authors developed a teaching method of emotional expression (neutral, joy, sadness and anger) using the sentences about the impression of emotional expression. The teaching sentences of emotional expression were as follows: dot politely and slowly with a constant rhythm (neutral); dot rhythmically (joy); dot weakly and slowly (sadness); dot strongly and little bit quickly (anger). The results of the evaluation experiment showed that the non-disabled subjects could express emotions better than the subjects who were not taught the features of emotional expression. The authors also evaluated the emotional expression by applying the emotion feature vectors and their distances. 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.