Vanderbilt University Peabody College of Education and Human Development

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New smartpen and paper to help teach blind college students

Staff Reports

Subjects like physics, calculus and biology are challenging for most students, but imagine tackling these topics without being able to see the graphs and figures used to teach them. A new smartpen and paper technology that works with touch and records classroom audio aims to bring these subjects to life for blind students.

“Mainstream approaches to teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) courses all rely strongly on diagrams, graphs, charts and other figures, putting students with visual disabilities at a significant disadvantage,” Andy Van Schaack, assistant professor of the practice of human and organizational development, said. “Our goal is to enable students and teachers to produce and explore diagrams and figures through touch and sound using a smartpen and paper technology that is low-cost, portable and easy to use.”

Van Schaack and colleague Joshua Miele, a researcher at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute who is blind, received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to apply the new technology, created by the company Livescribe, to this effort. Van Schaack is Livescribe’s senior science adviser.

“A new world of possibilities has opened for the rapid creation of portable, low-cost, high-quality accessible graphics enhanced with audio. For example, a visually impaired psychology student could learn neuroanatomy by exploring a diagram of the brain, with each lobe, gyrus and sulcus’s name spoken as the smartpen touches it,” Van Schaack said.

The Livescribe smartpen recognizes handwritten marks through a camera inside its tip that focuses on a minute pattern of dots printed on paper. It captures more than 100 hours of audio through a built-in microphone and plays audio back through a built-in speaker or 3D recording headset. Files are uploaded from the pen to a computer using a USB connection.

As for other uses of the smartpen, Van Schaack believes the possibilities are endless.

“It really is a new computer platform. It includes most of the technology found in a typical laptop, but gets its information from handwriting rather than from a keyboard and mouse,” Van Schaack said. “One of the most immediate uses of it that I see will be for college students. It will allow them to spend more time listening in class while taking more of an outline form of notes. Later, when they are reviewing their handwritten notes, they can tap within them to hear what the professor was saying when they wrote a particular note.”