Last year we saw a robot cane for visually impaired people that warns its user of obstacles with an audible alert. The Virtual Aid for the Visually Impaired or VAVI by grade 10 student Roman Kozak is an even more convenient prototype for a high tech cane. It lets the user search Google Maps and be guided towards his or her destination by voice prompts.
An IIT Delhi lab has developed an innovative high-tech cane that allows blind persons to easily guide themselves through their environment. It uses modern sensor technology to detect obstacles and what’s more, it carries an affordable price tag.
A woman who has been blind since birth sits at a table with a bowl of mostly green apples in front of her. When asked to find the single red one, she plucks it from the bowl without hesitation and holds it up to applause from the audience.
The New Jersey Institute of Technology will host its second-annual TechQuest and Innovation Day this Friday, April 11, from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
I refer to the commentary “Right time to step towards a self-service society” (March 18). I am visually impaired and would say that our front-line departments such as at immigration and airport check-in counters, hospitals and polyclinics, banks, etc, even with the person in attendance, do not assist us to know when our turn is.
My suggestion for the authorities is that they help provide relevant voice assistive technology or gadgets, so that we can embrace self-service. Spare some thought for the blind.
A wearable device developed by a 23-year-old Indian based in Kerala has just concluded an overwhelmingly successful campaign on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo. Fin, a tiny hardware product that you can wear on your thumb as a ring and which converts your whole palm into a gesture interface, has raised about $200,000 from some 1,600 people around the world who have pre-ordered the product.
There are around 70 million people with disabilities in India, with half of them being under the age of 30. This was one of the facts that came up at the recent Techshare India, a pan-India disability conference and event, which took place on February 13 and 14.
The device can be used to record lectures, listen to scanned documents and web downloads
FingerReader, a device developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab, reads text aloud as users run their fingers over each word. The device can be used by visually impaired people who require help with accessing printed text and also for language translation.
MIT Media Lab has released a video demonstrating wearable technology that could help people with visual impairments read more easily.
Wearers of “FingerReader” move their fingers over words on a page, and the device reads the text back to them. “The FingerReader algorithm knows to detect and give feedback when the user veers away from the baseline of the text,” according to its website.
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