Overview / Usage

There are 285 million visually impaired in the world. 21 million of which live in the United States. In order for these people to navigate the physical world, they have to either use the white cane or a guide dog. Unfortunately, each of these tools have tradeoffs such as not being hands free or being travel friendly.

We are offering a cost efficient unique hat that can be used to potentially replace white canes and guide dogs. Our smart hat offers collision detection by using the intel real sense depth sensor and provides real time vibration feedback on both the left and right side of the hat. We also offer the ability to press a button sensor to text a friend for help (using Twilio) and a feature that enables the user to take a picture and have the text spoken to him/her.

That last feature uses the real sense camera to take a picture and sends it to Google Vision API, so that it can perform text recognition. Next, this text is sent to IBM watson using the IBM Bluemix openwisk API which returns a sound file that is played audibiliy for the user using the bluetooth provided by the intel joule.