Hi r/blind

I am working on something I think you’ll find very interesting.

I hope I’m not violating any subreddit rules with this post, but if so please let me know.

My organization have developed a solution, that enables blind people to navigate buildings, and outdoor areas with beacons, a dynamic CMS system, and an iPhone, with our app and the voice over function turned on, (as most blind people already have).
The solution is called Blinfo and is currently installed in a number of buildings in Denmark. The managers of these building access the CMS systems, where they can update the message, that each beacon pushes to our app, when a person with this app installed gets close enough to the specific beacon. Right now our system can manage 20 unique beacons, but you can clone the beacons in the CMS systems and thereby have way more than 20 physical beacons.

Now we are trying to develop something you could call a Home Kit or Travel Kit for blind individuals, and this is where I hope, you could provide us with some feedback. By the way, I know a lot of people refer to blind as visually impaired, but our solutions are mostly useful for people who cannot see at all, and therefore, for the sake of clarity I use the term blind.

The idea is that blind people would download the app that we are currently developing and use it in their own home, at work, when traveling or in any other situation we have not thought about yet. The app would be able to do mainly 2 things. First thing. Identify beacons, NFC tags, Wifi modules, other smartphones etc. and record messages which the blind user record and attach to the identified beacons, NFC tag, Wifi module and so on. Second thing. Push the recorded messages when the user gets within a set distance from the beacon, NFC tag etc. Example for clarification. Coming home from grocery shopping with a family member, friend or helper, all the groceries have to go in the kitchen closets and drawers. The different closets and drawers have NFC tags on them, so when you put the groceries in place you record where everything goes with our app. This enables you to evaluate what is coconut milk and what is baked beans even though their shapes are similar, because you have recorded which is in the left and right corner of the closet. Another example. Members of your family purchase a Beacon to put in their key ring, so every time they approach your residence you get a push message so you know who are coming or who entered your house. A third example. You are traveling with friends or family and staying at a hotel. In order to become more independent you have brought along 5 beacons which you place in strategic positions in the hotel (no screws or anything needed - they have an adhesive layer which leaves to marks). After the first day at your destination, you can find your way inside the hotel, in the areas you have rigged with beacons.

So. We are planning on prototyping and testing this solution in the coming 6 months, and then develop the finished product Q1 2017. What do you think about it? Would it be useful? Could you come up with other more important use cases? Other directions we should look into?

Our mission is to make the world more accessible using technology. Of course we need to make money doing so. Otherwise we cannot deliver a great product with continuous support and updates.

We plan on charging a monthly subscription fee for the app, and then support the most used types of beacons, NFC tags, Geo locations etc. These are cheap now and will only become cheaper with time. 3 beacons can be bought for 80 USD and 10 NFC tags for something like 50 USD. In the future we hope that tags like these can be sold with braille text on them.

The monthly subscription fee would be between 6 and 9 USD, which includes support and fair number of tags and beacons controlled from your account.

While developing this Home Kit slash Travel Kit, we will continue to diffuse our building solution to institutions, where many blind and severely visually impaired people come. If you have ideas to places that could be interested in this, please let us know as well.

If you know about any other places online, where we could get feedback, I would be very grateful for these links as well. We are working closely with the blind community in Denmark, and they are thrilled about our buildings product and love the idea about the Home Kit slash Travel Kit idea.