UP TO THE MINUTE ?
A platform providing innovative solutions for the differently-abled
“The measure of a man, or woman, is not so much what they have accomplished, though that has weight. It often is much more though what that man or woman has overcome to accomplish what they have.” ― Leif Gregersen, Through The Withering Storm.
Life has provided each one of us with unique skills and abilities. Most of us have been gifted with the sense of sight, speech ,etc. But not all of us are blessed.
According to the World Report of Disability by WHO, the specially-abled people make up about 15% of our population, which is quite considerable.
Not everyone experiences the hardship that these people face. We have tried to think of challenges that they might have to overcome and have found answers for some of them using technology.
“Up to the Minute?” is an innovative solution, which helps differently-abled people lead more comfortable lives having access to multiple features all in one place. It also has applications that will help them adjust to the “new normal” post-Covid-19.
The most basic need for a visually impaired individual would be to commute on their own. Being unable to see, they would need something that can guide them around. We have tried to build an “Object detection” model that takes in live feed through a camera and assists the individual. We have also included a “Social distancing tracker”, which gives out a warning alert when the distance maintained is less than the minimum required.
Another feature that we have included is to assist them in education. They can enjoy the pleasure of reading by uploading a pdf and listening to it.
In addition to this, we have provided an option to listen to the book’s synopsis/preview to help them get a perspective before reading.
For the hearing impaired individuals, the obvious factor is to help them hear. This we made possible by building a “Speech to Text” model which converts spoken sentences to text, and help the individuals hear others out. They can also save this text just by a click, for future use. This will be helpful especially when lip reading is not possible viz., during the pandemic.
Similarly, for the speech impaired individuals, we have “Text to Speech” Conversion feature.
Communication is a way of showcasing ourselves to this world. But being unable to do so, and the need to use symbols to speak out our mind, one may not be able to express themselves clearly. We have made an attempt to help these individuals with a platform to speak out their mind freely. All they need to do is to type out what they have in mind in the provided text box and the model reads the text out loud. There is an option of selecting male/female version also.
These are the initial thoughts that we had and tried to implement. Some more that we can think of, include making this entire solution voice enabled, and also make it available across platforms to reach out a larger audience.
It has been great pleasure to work for this noble cause and make use of technology to help the specially-abled people lead easier lives. We will continue to work with this motto and try to do more in this space.
Written by :
Sources : https://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/report/en/
