Integrating Technology & Lifestyle for differently-abled — Anirudh Sharma
Technologist & Innovator Anirudh Sharma talks how his invention LeChal shoes, for people with Visual Impairment, today has become a global lifestyle product.
It would have been as life as usual for the techie in Anirudh Sharma, then working for HP Labs near Koramangala, Bengaluru, hadn’t it been for a chance encounter with person with visual impairment who asked him for directions to a sweet shop. Anirudh gave this person verbal instructions while the person was expecting Anirudh to lead him to the shop. This got Anirudh thinking about how best the technology could help people with visual impairment navigate in their day to day lives. Back in office, when he shared this experience with his co-workers, the advice he got was to ‘step into the shoes of the blind’ and experience things from their perspective. Anirudh took their advice, literally, and built a prototype of a shoes with vibration motors that one’s feet could feel which were controlled by a micro-controller chip. This smart shoe prototype later became the globally renowned LeChal shoes. LeChal went on to win a lot of global accolades and today is a lifestyle product and people from all walks of life have started adopting it. In Anirudh’s view, the solutions to many of our problems are available if we look at them with an inter-disciplinary approach. LeChal shoes was a combination of haptic feedback that people with visual impairment relied on aided by technology and mobility. Today, Anirudh is incorporating this inter-disciplinary approach of LeChal to problems around us like reducing air pollution.
Here’s the full talk by this master innovator.
