The Blind Are Charging Forward into the Wearable Tech Frontier
Moshe Fischer, 67, has spent much of his life hiding the fact that he’s blind. Born with a condition called ocular albinism, Fischer says his teachers were “unsympathetic” to his academic failings, so he latched onto peers who were known to take the best notes. Later, as a medical administrator, he relied on his secretary to help him with all things text. “I don’t know how I did it, but I did it,” Fischer recalls with a chuckle.
Today, deep in retirement, Fischer says he’s done “just getting by,” after having discovered a lightweight, wearable device called OrCam, which attaches to his eyeglasses and uses a camera to read text, describe products, and identify faces through a mini-speaker. Fischer points his finger at a newspaper article or a bus stop or looks at a face in front of him and gets all the information delivered straight to his ear.
OrCam was founded in Jerusalem in 2010 as an offshoot of MobilEye, the Israeli company recently acquired by Intel to produce car sensors and cameras for driverless cars. The company took inspiration from MobilEye’s guiding use of digital vision and artificial intelligence to prevent life-threatening accidents, repurposing that technology to enable blind people to lead more independent and more dignified lives.
