Emotion Feature Vector of Finger Braille

Finger Braille is one of tactual communication media of deafblind people. Deafblind people who are skilled in Finger Braille can catch up with speech conversation and express various emotions. Because there are small non-disabled people who are skilled in Finger Braille, deafblind people communicate only with interpreters. Objective of this study is development of a Finger Braille supporting 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 evaluation method of emotional expression by non-disabled people, we defined an emotional feature vector of Finger Braille and calculated distances of the emotion feature vectors as dissimilarities of them. As the results of experiment by non-disabled people, it was considered that the emotion feature vector was well characterized emotional expression and could be applied to evaluation of emotional expression.