The Future Intelligent City for Blind People?
Several weeks ago I wrote about a semi-finalist project which used crowd-sourced environmental data in Ericsson Innovation Award 2016, and along with three other projects it is now in the final round to win the award.
This year’s theme is to shape the future of city life and another finalist SoundVision is particularly interesting to this topic that not a lot of people and innovators talk about. Citing from the award’s website, “SoundVision (University of British Columbia, Canada): a mobile device that converts three-dimensional spatial information into sound so that blind individuals can identify their surroundings more effectively.”
Further information about this team or the technology they are using is nowhere available on the internet, but I found a similar patent mobile device that captures images and analyzes the user’s surrounding objects and their moving patterns and converts the information to audible messages to blind people, and that was in 2014. With AI and Deep Learning advancing such sensor technologies, blind people can enjoy urban life more.
Wearable devices for blind people is no news, a good paper has summarized some of the existing technologies and methodologies that assist blind people using touching and hearing. Most of them are from the perspective of blind people about how to adapt to urban life, but what can planners do to make the city more livable for blind people?
In designing the future of intelligent cities where driverless cars and buses provide more efficient transportation, blind people’s needs should also be taken into consideration, such as more crossing time on the streets. And intelligent cities should not only be designed to healthy young promising adults but also old, disabled, young in all aspects of urban life.
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