Dot Braille – The smartwatch for the blind

The Dot Braille smartwatch is a wearable much awaited by blind or sighted people. Why ? Simply because it’s the very first braille smartwatch.

Dot Braille will finally be available from next month after three years of delay following its presentation. The company hopes to deliver 100,000 watches in 2017, and nearly 40,000 by the start of next year. The least we can say is that success is there since all these smart health connected watches are already reserved.

But then, why this success for the Dot smartwatch? Unlike most assistive smartwatches for the blind, which rely on audio functionality, the Dot projects messages via Braille characters onto a screen. Physically, this takes the form of six dots which rise to produce four Braille characters at a time. For information, the characters are displayed at speeds from 1 to 100 per second. Users can also send replies.

Eric Juyoon Kim, founder and CEO of Dot, said the wearable is simply the first step in bringing a full line of braille devices to the visually impaired; and especially for those in developing countries. Dot has already signed an agreement with the government of Kenya to produce 8,000 future units of its educational braille reader; the Dot Mini.

He also plans to collaborate with Google for the launch next year of the Dot Pad, an e-reader that will display shapes and images through buttons – something that could potentially help with math learning and art.

For the record, among the 140,000 customers of the brand there would be Stevie Wonder. In any event, we will see in the future if society can keep up; will it manage to innovate and produce such quantities?

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