Lechal, the world's first interactive haptic feedback footwear company.Lechal makes Insoles and shoes with vibratory feedback for hands-off and eyes-off interaction.
NAVIG is a multidisciplinary and innovative project aiming at augmenting the autonomy of visually impaired people in their basic daily actions the most problematic: navigation and object localization. This video presents the different components of the systems (artificial vision, 3D sounds rendered by binaural synthesis, pedestrian GIS, vocal interface,...) and the prototype being developed.
A new device developed by researchers in India uses ultrasound to guide the visually impaired through the busy streets.
Known as the SmartCane, the new device sends out ultrasound waves to surrounding areas and identifies obstacles by detecting the echoes that bounce back from nearby objects. Once an obstacle is detected, it uses vibrations to inform and divert the user around it.
Regular white canes can only detect obstacles up to knee height, while the Smartcane can detect obstacles from knee to head height, CNN reports.
E. Nojavani, A. Rezaeezade, and Monadjemi. International Journal on Soft Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Applications (IJSCAI), 4 (1):
23 - 37(February 2015)
M. Banâtre, P. Couderc, J. Pauty, and M. Becus. Mobile Human-Computer Interaction – MobileHCI 2004, volume 3160 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg, (2004)
S. Harper, C. Goble, and S. Pettitt. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 4, page 399--403. London, UK, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, (2003)
V. Stein, R. Neßelrath, J. Alexandersson, and J. Tröger. Proceedings of the 3nd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-11), page 462-467. Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands, (2011)
L. Francisco-Revilla, and J. Crow. HT '09: Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, New York, NY, USA, ACM, (July 2009)