Braive: IoT Enabled Smart Braille Learning Glove for Assistive Education

Abstract: Learning Braille is essential for visually impaired children, yet trained teachers and affordable tactile learning tools are scarce. This paper presents Braive, an IoT-based Braille learning system that pairs a wearable glove with an Android application over Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). An ESP32 in the glove drives six vibration motors arranged as the dots of a Braille cell and reads six tactile switches for input. The Kotlin application offers a Learning Mode, a five- level gamified Practice Mode with an adaptive question generator, and a word-spelling Test Mode, while speech recognition, text-to-speech feedback and an on-device Room database allow fully offline operation. BLE latency, recognition accuracy and learning outcomes were not measured, and no study with visually impaired learners has yet been carried out. The two-part architecture keeps lesson logic on the phone and real-time actuation on the glove, providing a modular, low-cost approach to Braille education built from commodity components.

Keywords: Braille learning, smart glove, Internet of Things, ESP32, Bluetooth Low Energy, haptic feedback, assistive technology, Android application