Microsoft's Seeing AI helps the blind to see

Besides it's strategic bet on bots, Microsoft has shown a very interesting project that uses their recently opened Cognitive Services API's, allowing a blind person to see.

Toyota's Project Blaid helps the blind to see

We're big fans of technology, but even more so when it's used to help those that need it the most. Toyota's Project Blaid is a wearable device that wants to give sight to those who can't see.

Be My Eyes crowdsources visual help for the blind

We've seen smartphones act as visual tools for the blind, reading texts and identifying colors, but this Be My Eyes goes even further while sidestepping automated visual recognition algorithms and relying on actual people to do the job.

iSense for iPad

If it's true that touch interfaces allow us to find infinite ways to improve user interfaces, the truth is, it also makes life harder for everyone not able to see.

This iSense for iPad is a concept that would allow anyone to turn a flat tablet touchscreen into a dynamic sensable surface allowing blind people - and everyone else, for the matter - to have a physical feedback to the underlying interface.

Unfortunately it's nothing but an imagination concetp for now, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere had already found a suitable photo-reactive material that would make this iSense possible in the not so distant future.


iSense from Kikki Tham Sterner on Vimeo.

LookTel - Artifical Vision for the Blind

Have you ever thought how much is still left to do for all those people that need technology the most?
Take the blind or the visually impaired people... We currently have some much processing power in a regular smartphone; couldn't it be put to use to aid them in their daily life?

That's exactly what LookTel wants to do, and it seem to be doing a pretty good job at it - as you can see in the following video:



At the moment, most of the hard work is done in a remote desktop computer, but as technology evolves it0s just a matter of time before it could all be done in the smartphone itself (or maybe using standard web services in the cloud.)