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Another day with Sunu. It's not looking good (self.Blind)
submitted by Laser_Lens_4
It's the weekend! That means I don't have the excuse of being at work for sitting all day.
Today I went 2 places with the Sunu Band.
My first stop was my healthcare provider to get some blood work done. This was a different office than the one I went to the other day. This one consists of multiple buildings, each with 2 floors.
I went with my mom, of course, because screw going alone someplace that confusing.
Inside the band was no help at all. It buzzed and buzzed even when there were no obstacles in my path. The office had hard floors and moderate to heavy foot traffic.
When she was with me I had to ask her to walk behind me because her body kept interfering with the sensor. Being my mother she failed miserably at this because she had to be beside her child.
Even when waiting in a line the band did not help. It kept buzzing and buzzing.
Something else I have noticed is that my cane sweeps falsely trigger the band a lot. Despite my best efforts to narrow my sweeps and switch to constant contact I couldn't stop the false triggers.
Even when I made sure I was walking in front of her I still kept getting inconsistent buzzing in there. Outside it was no more helpful than my cane.
Next I went to Costco. Again it was not much help. Eventually I got frustrated and shut it off. There were just too many people in there and it kept getting set off by shopping carts moving around. I did not find that helpful.
I should add a little more here. On Friday I used the band on my way home. The other day when I went to the doctor was an exception and I usually take the bus home.
The band did not help in finding the bus stop.
Yes, it can detect the signpole but it can only do so at very close range. It also only briefly detects it when sweeping an area.
This keyed me into another problem. The time between the band coming into range of an obstacle and actually buzzing is delayed. There is a good second or two before it'lll alert you about an obstacle. This makes it useless for anything moving or small like the signpost. So if you are sweeping an area and you come across a narrow obstacle, such as a signpost, you are more than likely not even going to know it's there. The cane, which usually finds signposts half a nanosecond before I slam into them, is more useful than this band.
Now I'd like to talk about the band's other main feature, telling time. It works well, albeit slowly.
When the sonar sensor is off you can swipe up on the watch face to get the minutes. As far as I can tell the way it tells time is as follows: a short buzz equals 1, a long buzz equals 5, the band will buzz to tell me what the tens digit is then pause and repeat for the ones digit. For example, a pause followed by 1 long buzz and 2 short buzzes means that the minute is 07.
To get the hours you swipe down. When getting the hours there will be no pause since it only has to ocunt up to 12. For 12 it would give two long buzzes and 2 short buzzes.
Now I haven't actually read the manual and I could be completely wrong but that's what I've gotten from it by using it.
It works but it is slow. You also have to wake up the watch first by pressing the home button on the side so the time-telling feature is rather annoying to use.
Boy. I am not happy about this. I'm really not happy. I was expecting a lot more from this band but it has disappointed me. It's unreliable and stressful. Someone who has no sight at all may get a little More out of it than me but this is a difficult product to recommend. On top of that this thing is so ridiculously cheap. This is not the build quality I would expect from a $300 product. There is nothing but plastic outside. The housing for the sonar sensor appears to be steel or aluminium but that's it. Well, I guess the buckle is metal. The band itself is generic and made of silicone. The watch is not uncomfortable but you can't put it on and forget about it either. It doesn't quite conform to the wrist due to its shape.
Really all this is good for is telling time slowly and being a sonar sensor.
I have a Xiaomi Mi Band 2. It's a$35 fitness tracker from China. It counts my steps, tracks my sleep, and has a manually-activated heart rate monitor. It also connects to my phone and syncs all the data. Besides having better build quality it's also far more useful than the Sunu Band. It also looks nicer and is more comfortable. It also has a custom charging solution.
Why is a product that costs 8.5 times as much so terrible? I understand the smaller market but the quality of the Sunu Band is ridiculous. Perhaps I am comparing apples and oranges here but both of these are sharing space on my wrist. That and, despite the niche-ness of adaptive technology it isn't made in a vacuum. I am always going to be comparing it to mainstream tech.
I think the Sunu Band will be going back.
I'll also write up a proper review that condenses my thoughts into something shorter.
TL;DR Sunu Band did not work for me. Too unreliable and cheap materials.
Today I went 2 places with the Sunu Band.
My first stop was my healthcare provider to get some blood work done. This was a different office than the one I went to the other day. This one consists of multiple buildings, each with 2 floors.
I went with my mom, of course, because screw going alone someplace that confusing.
Inside the band was no help at all. It buzzed and buzzed even when there were no obstacles in my path. The office had hard floors and moderate to heavy foot traffic.
When she was with me I had to ask her to walk behind me because her body kept interfering with the sensor. Being my mother she failed miserably at this because she had to be beside her child.
Even when waiting in a line the band did not help. It kept buzzing and buzzing.
Something else I have noticed is that my cane sweeps falsely trigger the band a lot. Despite my best efforts to narrow my sweeps and switch to constant contact I couldn't stop the false triggers.
Even when I made sure I was walking in front of her I still kept getting inconsistent buzzing in there. Outside it was no more helpful than my cane.
Next I went to Costco. Again it was not much help. Eventually I got frustrated and shut it off. There were just too many people in there and it kept getting set off by shopping carts moving around. I did not find that helpful.
I should add a little more here. On Friday I used the band on my way home. The other day when I went to the doctor was an exception and I usually take the bus home.
The band did not help in finding the bus stop.
Yes, it can detect the signpole but it can only do so at very close range. It also only briefly detects it when sweeping an area.
This keyed me into another problem. The time between the band coming into range of an obstacle and actually buzzing is delayed. There is a good second or two before it'lll alert you about an obstacle. This makes it useless for anything moving or small like the signpost. So if you are sweeping an area and you come across a narrow obstacle, such as a signpost, you are more than likely not even going to know it's there. The cane, which usually finds signposts half a nanosecond before I slam into them, is more useful than this band.
Now I'd like to talk about the band's other main feature, telling time. It works well, albeit slowly.
When the sonar sensor is off you can swipe up on the watch face to get the minutes. As far as I can tell the way it tells time is as follows: a short buzz equals 1, a long buzz equals 5, the band will buzz to tell me what the tens digit is then pause and repeat for the ones digit. For example, a pause followed by 1 long buzz and 2 short buzzes means that the minute is 07.
To get the hours you swipe down. When getting the hours there will be no pause since it only has to ocunt up to 12. For 12 it would give two long buzzes and 2 short buzzes.
Now I haven't actually read the manual and I could be completely wrong but that's what I've gotten from it by using it.
It works but it is slow. You also have to wake up the watch first by pressing the home button on the side so the time-telling feature is rather annoying to use.
Boy. I am not happy about this. I'm really not happy. I was expecting a lot more from this band but it has disappointed me. It's unreliable and stressful. Someone who has no sight at all may get a little More out of it than me but this is a difficult product to recommend. On top of that this thing is so ridiculously cheap. This is not the build quality I would expect from a $300 product. There is nothing but plastic outside. The housing for the sonar sensor appears to be steel or aluminium but that's it. Well, I guess the buckle is metal. The band itself is generic and made of silicone. The watch is not uncomfortable but you can't put it on and forget about it either. It doesn't quite conform to the wrist due to its shape.
Really all this is good for is telling time slowly and being a sonar sensor.
I have a Xiaomi Mi Band 2. It's a$35 fitness tracker from China. It counts my steps, tracks my sleep, and has a manually-activated heart rate monitor. It also connects to my phone and syncs all the data. Besides having better build quality it's also far more useful than the Sunu Band. It also looks nicer and is more comfortable. It also has a custom charging solution.
Why is a product that costs 8.5 times as much so terrible? I understand the smaller market but the quality of the Sunu Band is ridiculous. Perhaps I am comparing apples and oranges here but both of these are sharing space on my wrist. That and, despite the niche-ness of adaptive technology it isn't made in a vacuum. I am always going to be comparing it to mainstream tech.
I think the Sunu Band will be going back.
I'll also write up a proper review that condenses my thoughts into something shorter.
TL;DR Sunu Band did not work for me. Too unreliable and cheap materials.
delha4 3 points 4y ago
Sounds like junk. Too bad.
joeflux 2 points 4y ago
I work on such devices. $300 for such a niche market really can't buy you high end sensors and hardware. Think about it this way - $300 barely pays for the software development alone.
I think the solution has got to be some combination of off-the-shelf equipment. An android watch for reporting, a high end android phone for processing, and some sort of cheap simple mount to let you wear your phone on your chest
That would mean around $1000 of equipment in total, but I think people wouldn't mind, because most people will have or need the phone already.
But the problem next is software development. It would cost around half million dollars to develop this software. But how many customers would I have? How much would I have to charge for the software?
(if anyone rich wants to actually give it a shot and hire me to make this, let me know. I'm serious.)
I think the solution has got to be some combination of off-the-shelf equipment. An android watch for reporting, a high end android phone for processing, and some sort of cheap simple mount to let you wear your phone on your chest
That would mean around $1000 of equipment in total, but I think people wouldn't mind, because most people will have or need the phone already.
But the problem next is software development. It would cost around half million dollars to develop this software. But how many customers would I have? How much would I have to charge for the software?
(if anyone rich wants to actually give it a shot and hire me to make this, let me know. I'm serious.)
fastfinge 1 points 4y ago
I wonder if any of this could be offset somehow by collecting the data? Large companies are starting to want lots and lots of high-quality outdoor maps for self-driving cars, and high quality indoor maps for robotics and other uses. If a blind person was using high quality data collecting and processing hardware everywhere we travel, could the data it generates be collected up and sent off to companies who have other uses for it? This seems like a cheap way to get lots of mapping cameras out in the wild, that will be frequently used, and visit a wide variety of locations.
Laser_Lens_4 [OP] 1 points 4y ago
I would gladly pay triple the price if it meant I got something that was actually helpful. As for software the basic functionality is just simple maths. It's the same Principle as radar. Send out some pulses of energy, count the time it takes for them to come back, and calculate how far something is by using that information. You could probably do something similar on an Arduino in an hour or two.
joeflux 1 points 4y ago
That won't detect anything thin, long and rounded, like a pole. If you set the sensitivity high enough to detect a pole, it will go off constantly from even electrical noise.
Imho, the correct approach is vision based. Modern mobile phones can run deep neural networks that can detect objects. Pushes the problem from hardware to software,which is nice because software is free to distribute and easy to upgrade.
Imho, the correct approach is vision based. Modern mobile phones can run deep neural networks that can detect objects. Pushes the problem from hardware to software,which is nice because software is free to distribute and easy to upgrade.
Laser_Lens_4 [OP] 1 points 4y ago
I'm not sure mobile phones have enough local processing power to do something like that. Not only do you have to take a high bandwidths input from a camera and figure out what's an obstacle and what's a clear-path, you then have to take that and transform it into a much lower bandwidth output. It's going to take quite a bit of hardware and software to get an AI to speak to you exactly what obstacles are in your path.
The former portion of this is being done by autonomous vehicles now, but those are expensive systems integrated into a rather large machine. Even a simple head-mounted display with cameras designed for the visually impaired cost somewhere between the low-to-mid thousands. Something with proper AI and enough computing power to do what you're describing would be monstrously expensive. I'm not sure it could even be done cheaply if it were being made for the mass Market. Not for at least several years anyway.
I would love something you could wear that verbally tells you what's in front of you. That would be genuinely helpful. I think it'll happen sooner rather than later, but not for several years.
The former portion of this is being done by autonomous vehicles now, but those are expensive systems integrated into a rather large machine. Even a simple head-mounted display with cameras designed for the visually impaired cost somewhere between the low-to-mid thousands. Something with proper AI and enough computing power to do what you're describing would be monstrously expensive. I'm not sure it could even be done cheaply if it were being made for the mass Market. Not for at least several years anyway.
I would love something you could wear that verbally tells you what's in front of you. That would be genuinely helpful. I think it'll happen sooner rather than later, but not for several years.
joeflux 2 points 4y ago
Google lens already does pretty much that, and runs on normal android hardware. And phones are only getting faster, and new phones even have dedicated tensorflow units for doing this.
And you mention 'several years' - even if that's right, that's what you'd be aiming for. It would take a year minimum to get a product to market anyway even with a good team. With a small team it would be a couple of years.
Making something basic that just tells you what is in front of you would be a couple of month's work. It would be basic but it would work. I'd do it for $10k.
I do this stuff for a living.
And you mention 'several years' - even if that's right, that's what you'd be aiming for. It would take a year minimum to get a product to market anyway even with a good team. With a small team it would be a couple of years.
Making something basic that just tells you what is in front of you would be a couple of month's work. It would be basic but it would work. I'd do it for $10k.
I do this stuff for a living.
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