Digital Cane - The idea

The motivation

Life as a blind person is fairly challenging. Tools like guide dogs are nice, but it’s still hard to have the same quality of life as a non-impaired person.

The idea

There are two big areas where being blind is a big impediment: navigation/hazard avoidance and personal communication.

Navigation

Navigating streets and buildings can be dangerous for the blind; cars and stairways can be extremely hazardous. What blind people need is technology that allows them to use another sense to replace sight. I think the Microsoft Kinect sensor is nearly perfect for this job. A few well-placed sensors could measure the distances to most things around the blind person. Ideally, the size of the sensors would be smaller, because wearing four Kinect sensors could look rather silly. Nevertheless, these sensors would collect everything the blind person needs to traverse safely. The data from the sensors needs to get conveyed to the blind person. I think the best way to do that is a band around the chest or stomach. The band would have thousands of cell phone vibration motors. The motors would vibrate when there is an object close in that direction. The closer the object the more the vibration. The sensors would be angled at a slightly downward direction (towards the ground). This would result in the vision impaired person normall feeling a vibration when even ground is ahead and different vibrations when there is a staircase or other obstricle ahead. The Kinect sensors may need to get paired with longer range but coarser sensors that can ‘see’ cars. A special warning, perhaps auditory, should be issued when a fast moving object is approaching and might hit the user. I think with these sensors and the vibrator motors, blind people could see well enough not to need a stick or a guide dog.

Personal communication

Blind people are at a disadvantage when it comes to in-person communication. People can say as much with their posture, facial expressions, and gestures as with their words. To reach parity with people who can see, the blind need help. The Kinect sensor above could be useful to detect gestures, and maybe posture, but it couldn’t help with understanding people’s facial expressions. I think something like Google glass or some other small head-mounted camera would also be needed. Facial recognition and emotion recognition are now possible.  So, the user could know who the speaker is and what their face says about their mood.

The monetization

The software and hardware would be sold as a set. I think it could sell for $3,000 per unit.

The growth potential

There are over 1 million legally blind people in the US. If 1% of them buy one of these units per year that would $30 million in revenue per year.

The fun part

Like my idea for helping the deaf, the fun challenge here is to get the right pairing of hardware and software that ‘just works.’ This should be like a new set of skin for the blind person. Ideally users would use the word ‘seamless’ to describe the product.

The pitch

Having a vision impairment isn’t safe and doesn’t make life easy. Digital Cane helps by making everything around the blind person as simple and easy to process as a sighted person. Also, its head-mount camera makes picking up the subtleties of conversion a breeze.