In modern society, people spend most of their time on various types of chairs. However, it is not easy for a designer to design a comfortable chair because satisfaction with the chair depends not only on the quantitative elements such as size, but also on the qualitative element such as the user’s feeling. To deal with these problems, there have been many studies on designing ergonomic chairs. This paper proposes the haptic-aided design (HAD) system to design an ergonomic chair. Based on the HAD system, the designer can experience whether the chair is comfortable or not through the haptic device, and also can modify the design parameters instantaneously. The haptic chair capable of controlling the design parameters in real time was proposed as a haptic simulator. The controllable parameters, such as seat height, reclining angle, stiffness of the backrest, and so on were selected based on the previous research related to ergonomic chairs. The proposed methodology will help reduce the development cost and time by replacing the process of making the real mock-ups and prototypes with the haptic chair.

In an information-oriented society, visually impaired persons also should obtain the information with relative ease. They tend to receive the information of letters by tactile sensation through braille display systems. Several types of braille display systems have been suggested so far, but none of them have been widely used yet. The braille display system should provide multiple lines of braille units to improve the level of understanding. In this paper, we propose a cell type braille unit with 3x2 dots, each of which consists of a piezoelectric linear motor. A braille cell is small and lightweight enough to be portable, and it can be easily assembled in multiple lines. The preliminary tests using the proposed braille display system show that it can provide the information that can be well perceived by visually impaired persons.