Technological advancements for the blind

February 16, 2016
Fangman Ho  Besant Hill School  11th grade

By Fangman Ho
Besant Hill School
11th grade

Inventors continue to work on creations that greatly assist the disabled. For instance, a recent Ted Talk given last month discussed an application that has been developed for blind people to allow users to walk without the help of others.

This technology is called Home Page Reader, which was first developed in 1997. It can help the blind read, listen, and learn. More recently, it has become a visual aid and application that people can download from the Internet.

With the development of smart phones, every single smart phone has a camera that can record things, a feature that is extremely helpful for this application. When a blind person holds the phone and the camera faces a person, the app can tell who this person is, according to the address book in your phone.

This application not only can recognize people’s faces, but also can recognize their emotions. When a blind person holds the phone, the app can tell whether one person or another is happy or not.

However, at the same time, it is not the most convenient or polite for blind people to hold phones up to people’s faces, so the inventor Chieko Asakawa also invented electronic glasses. The glasses have a camera in the middle so that they can transmit any of its recordings to the phone. Then the phone analyzes it, and finally, the message will be delivered into the earphone that the blind person wears.

Ultimately, this application may not be perfectly fit to be distributed worldwide just yet. However, it is progress that has the potential to be of significant influence.

One Comment

  1. kelly

    November 27, 2017 at 10:36 AM

    yes..I like the basic concepts behind Second Life but it seems incredibly outdated and when I played it was intensely non-intuitive / user friendly to an extent that made EVE look like a game for toddlers. thanks from
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