Curation assignment. Robot sensory perception could help the blind get around. Being blind does not mean the end of the world, but for many, it makes life a whole lot harder since it is tougher to get around. Good thing technology has made leaps and bounds in this area, where technologies used in robots to help them navigate through their surroundings have been modified and adapted to assist the blind folk get around indoor and outdoor spaces without any additional help – certainly a far more technologically advanced solution compared to the humble (but superbly useful) walking stick is needed. Enter this system that is being developed by Edwige Pissaloux and colleagues at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. Read on after the jump to find out how robotic vision might eventually phase out the walking stick to help the blind get around.
Should it be perfected, it might eventually enable blind folk to get around without any external help wherever they want to go. . Write With Your Eyes. It's every writer's dream: just look at the page and have the words appear. Jean Lorenceau, a neuroscientist at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, has developed an interface to do that, by tracking eye movement.
With a little training, he says, a person can learn to control a cursor on a screen. This isn't a cure for writer's block, though. Lorenceau sees it as an aid to people who are paralyzed and want to communicate. He plans to test it with people who have Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. BLOG: Man Implants Magnets In Arm To Hold iPod The system works by attaching a camera to the person's head (using a frame for glasses). Ordinarily, when a human eye is not following something that moves, it makes what are called saccades. Lorenceau 's system tracks the eyes for 30 seconds at a time. BLOG: Camera Uses Eye Blink To Snap Photo The system isn't as sophisticated as it could be — there are ways to add processing to smooth out the movement more. Bionic eye gives sight to the blind. Remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Well, I am quite sure if inflation was to be taken into account, Steve Austin would be worth far more than that today with his cybernetic enhancements, but this is another can of worms altogether.
What we are interested in today is a new ‘bionic eye’ microchip which has been implanted in the eyes of two blind British men, and the interesting thing is, these implants actually ended up with them receiving some form of vision for the first time in decades. The microchip itself measures 3mm in size, and were implanted behind the eyes of these men, being connected with electrodes. It takes weeks for the effect to kick in though, as they have both regained ‘useful vision’ after some time, being able to recognize faces and potentially see once again. According to James (one of the two blind men), “Since switching on the device I am able to detect light and distinguish the outlines of certain objects which is an encouraging sign. . Photos by Blind Photographers. Artificial intelligence app helps blind people - Imagine Cup.
A team of university students from the University of Auckland and Auckland University of Technology have created a smartphone app which uses artificial intelligence to help blind people make better visual sense of the world. The app, which has been designed for Windows phones, allows visually impaired users to take a photo of their surroundings, for example, a piece of clothing, and the app verbally describes the item to the user.
All the user needs to do is tap anywhere on the phone’s screen to capture a photo. Images are then compressed to around 50 to 70kb and sent to the app’s server for analysis. Artificial intelligence is then used to detect colours, text, darkness and brightness to analyse the image and send back a verbal description of the photo. “There are many things that computer or artificial intelligence can do, so it’s just using computer algorithms you can get some information about an image. With Chip Implanted In Retina, Blind Finnish Man Can Read. Artificial Retina Restores Basic Vision To The Blind – The Argus. Lawrence Livermore is preparing the electronics for Argus III, the third phase in creating a retinal prosthesis.
Restoring vision to the blind is one of the epic promises of technology, sort of like flying cars, ray guns, and a lovable robot side kick. Yet artificial sight isn’t a far off dream, it’s getting much closer to reality with the Argus project. Funded by the US Department of Energy and lead by Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Argus seeks to create an epiretinal prosthesis, a device that will take the image from a camera and send it to your brain via your optic nerve. The first two phases of Argus (which we call Argus I and Argus II) have had extraordinary success with implants in more than 30 patients. There are other epiretinal prosthesis in development. The Argus III will work by taking the image from a camera and wirelessly transmitting it to an electronics package. Of course, we’re not there quite yet, and no one’s even talking about cybernetic vision at LLNL. Amazing 'Eyeborg' man replaces lost eye with wireless video camera.
The National Alliance of Blind Students. Teaching Math to Visually Impaired Students. About Susan A. Osterhaus M.Ed. Secondary Mathematics Teacher Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired 1100 West 45th Street Austin, TX 78756 (512) 206-9305 e-mail: susanosterhaus@tsbvi.edu Susan Osterhaus has been teaching secondary mathematics for 30! Years at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Austin, Texas. She has a bachelor's degree in Mathematics, a master’s degree in Mathematics Education, and certifications in Secondary Math, English, and Teaching the Visually Impaired from the University of Texas at Austin. Susan has refined teaching strategies related to math content to enhance the understanding of visually impaired students.
In addition to her teaching duties, Susan has been innovative in developing adaptive materials for blind and visually impaired students. Citations: Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. (2003). Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. (2000). How Blind Photographers Like Chris Holmes Are Overcoming The Odds To Produce Stunning Images. At first it sounds almost like a oxymoron: if photography is the art of capturing a visual moment, how can someone who is blind be a successful photographer? Yet a growing online community is full of examples of precisely that, as visually impaired snappers share their experiences of producing quality work against the odds.
But how, and why? Chris Holmes became blind almost overnight at 14, due to a genetic eye disorder. A photographer since childhood, Holmes also happens to be one of Great Britain’s most successful Paralympic swimmers and a nine-times gold medalist. A photograph by Chris Holmes of his dog Lottie in his office, preparing for the Olympics. “It’s always marvellous to think about what you can do with a camera, how you can capture the essence of a moment”, he says. Holmes talks a lot about the importance of the “energy stored within a moment” - it’s clear that for him, photography’s ability to freeze time is what's most important. Paralympian Holmes takes his own self-portrait. My blind spot, my students and me | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional. "I was convinced that it was time to embrace my partial blindness and place it at the centre of my academic career," says Hannah Thompson. Photograph: James Clifford Kent. I have been registered blind all my life but because I have what opthalmologists like to call "some useful sight" in one eye, I have always operated in a sighted way and done my best to 'pass' as a fully sighted person.
Throughout my education at a mainstream comprehensive school and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, I studied using sighted methods and refused to learn braille or carry a white cane. I wasn't completely blind, but I wasn't completely sighted either. And I had no idea how to negotiate this shadowy in between space. Just over a year ago, an email exchange with American academic Cathy Kudlick convinced me that it was time to embrace my partial blindness and place it at the centre of my academic career. Teaching English to blind students. How do you describe colours to the blind? Are colours important to them? Are they fashion conscious? How do you teach poetry to them? How do they conceive concepts? Can they learn science? Do you know how to read Braille? Of all the subjects teaching English to the blind is the easiest. Understanding degrees of blindness Understanding the background Setting up a readers service Technological help In the classroom Reactions of other students Teaching tips Conclusion Understanding degrees of blindness First and foremost the teachers have to understand the visual condition of their blind student.
Is he or she totally blind? Whatever amount of residual vision that is left of a blind person should be utilised to the maximum. Understanding the background The next thing to do is to learn the background of the student. Setting up a readers service When confronted with a totally blind student do not despair. Textbooks could never be brailled in time for my blind students. Teaching tips. BlindSide: A Game for Players Who Can't See. Earlier this year, a minor injury to my right eye left me temporarily blind. I could do little but sit in bed and listen to audio books, until someone told me about the video game BlindSide, which doesn’t, in fact, contain any video.
It is a meticulously designed, audio-driven thriller that is entirely devoid of graphics. Built to entertain blind players as well as those who can see, the audio-only game’s accommodation of disabled gamers is a pleasant anomaly in the gaming industry, even though the number of gamers with disabilities is significant. The latest Americans with Disabilities report, which draws on 2010 census data, estimates that nearly fifty-seven million Americans, or roughly nineteen per cent of the population, have a disability, with over thirty-eight million suffering from what the report considers to be a “severe disability” of a physical, mental, or communicative nature.
BlindSide is one of those games. Others have sought to build on the game. Blind All Around the World.