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Blind and Visually Impaired Community

Full History - 2021 - 09 - 06 - ID#pjc9of
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Project to help blind/visually impaired (self.Blind)
submitted by BubbleMagic45
Hello!

A group of friends and I were working on developing something to help those who are blind/visually impaired navigate unknown areas via cameras and audio cues and wanted feedback on what would be most beneficial for those in need.

We were thinking of developing either glasses or a walking stick with cameras on them to detect obstacles in front and then relaying that to the user along with gps navigation through audio(with earbuds or something) or vibration to the user. Would this be beneficial to people and/or are there ways to improve on this that would be better?
gunfart 3 points 1y ago
Please don’t. There are tons of people who have tried the same thing, and has failed. It is not needed.

Also, please refer to it as a cane not a Walkingstick. Thank you.
OldManOnFire 2 points 1y ago
Hey Bubbles, thank you for wanting to help the blind community.

There's not an easy answer to your question because just like everybody else, people within the blind community don't all want the same things. We don't all have the same needs so there really isn't a one size fits all solution. Some of us don't want help and wouldn't accept it if it was offered. Others desperately need help but with something unique to them, like help identifying which small cardboard box in the grocery bag has the Zip-Loc baggies and which one has the fabric softener sheets. It's nearly impossible to come up with a new device the entire blind community will find useful.

I'm sure navigation is an issue for some blind people, but for many of us it isn't a problem. Let's say you engineer some sort of cost effective echolocation necklace that scans ten feet ahead and sends an audio tone in stereo through earbuds, with the pitch of the tone indicating the distance to an obstacle and the volume indicating its size. That would be cool. You'd help some people - but possibly not as many people as you imagine. Some of us won't use it. Some of us won't be comfortable wearing anything that identifies the user as blind, some of us are good enough at navigating that we won't benefit from it, some of us will prefer a guide dog or holding hands with a loved one or using a white cane, and most of the people who won't use it will choose not to based on reasons unique to them. I'm not trying to discourage you but I want to be honest with you. The blind community isn't that big, and the subset of the blind community that would use such a device is even smaller.

Don't expect sales figures in the millions.

But judging from your original post, it's not about six figures for you, it's about helping. In that case, rock on, Bubbles! Those people whose lives are improved by your endeavor may not be many in number but they're no less deserving or appreciative of what you and your friends can rig up for them.
BubbleMagic45 [OP] 2 points 1y ago
Thank you so much for your reply and words of encouragement!

It makes sense that so many people have such different needs/wants haha. And we definitely didn't want to come across as the engineers that go around trying to invent solutions and force it down people who didn't want anything.

Full transparency this was for a school project and we wanted to see if there was any way to help those in need so it wasn't for monetary benefits at all :). We'll do our best though to do some more research and try to develop something that hopefully some people in the community can truly benefit from! That's our main goal at the end of the day.
OldManOnFire 1 points 1y ago
A school project? In that case I'm volunteering myself to be your blind consultant and crash test dummy.

I used to teach math at the local community college. Education is important to me. But this isn't just a chance for me to help you, this is also a chance for you to help me. I miss feeling like a contributing member of society. I'll be happy to play even a small part in helping you help the blind community.
Rethunker 1 points 1y ago
If you'd like to develop assistive technology, reading available resources will save you a lot of time. Many, many people--and by that I mostly mean sighted engineers--have thought of building something **for** the BVI community without realizing they need to study first and then work **with** the community.

Please read this:

$1


A school project doesn't leave much time for development, especially since you'll need time to first learn what tech blind people in your community might want to have solved. Rather than trying to create a general product for a large community, find a small number of blind people in YOUR community, have conversations with them, and figure out what tech they'd like to have. You might even pick just one person and then make that one person really happy with something that is robust, useful daily, and addresses their request completely. Even developing something "simple" is hard work.

You're not going to develop smart glasses. You might create a simple prototype by attaching a depth sensor to a pair of sunglasses, but that's already a big project. If you're not already very familiar with image processing and 3D cloud processing, realize that it's very difficult to do well. For example, if I asked you to list three or more ways to fit planes to flat surfaces in cloud data, and if you don't know the names of the algorithms to accomplish this, you would have a lot to learn before you'd be ready to tackle the problem.

White cane with a camera? Not going to work. Even if you could bring the necessary processing power and hyper-optimized code to deal with motion, an enhanced cane is not wanted, generally. Don't try to replace the white cane or improve on it. There's a reason some researchers and people familiar with assistive tech use the phrase "ultrasonic cane graveyard."

As a rule, only develop tech when you can fill in a gap in the marketplace. To know what the gaps are, you need to do research first. That will save you lots of false starts.
MostlyBlindGamer 1 points 1y ago
When you do your due diligence and research the extensive list of projects in this field, you might want to use the words "audio cues," instead of misspelling that.
rumster 1 points 1y ago
Many technologies exist already that cover a lot of this type of stuff. But before you make a post on here, can you make a more detailed post on what your project is.

Project BLAID by Toyota and a secret HP project I worked on in my prior career is similar to what you're doing. Please be aware that others have tried to make things and a lot of them failed flat in a real world exercise.

Anyway, I hope you make something incredible! Goodluck!
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