Directions For Me
Small-footprint CCTV-type devices are blooming all over to provide people with visual disabilities magnified or audio access to product labels. However, this may be an involved process, especially if the labels are located in odd places–no one wants to be crawling all over a mattress, for example, just to get a shot of the “Do not remove under penalty of having bedbugs sprinkled in your hair” tag. Enter Directions For Me, a website that lists the product label information for food, health and beauty products, and a miscellaneous set of other consumables. This lets anyone pull up relevant product information on a smartphone or tablet during or even before their shopping trip. Buyer paradise? Well, yes, if Horizons for the Blind, the sponsoring non-profit, has continued funding to add, modify, or delete information on a regular basis. Fingers firmly crossed.
Boil howdy
The Boil Buoy gets put in the pot of water you’ve got on the stove. When the water hits the boiling stage, the Buoy gives out a ringing tone. Developed for the mainstream via Quirky, the design-by-consensus website, but we expect blind folks to account for a large percentage of the presale orders necessary for it to actually come to market.
Digital measurements
The Smart Finger prototype is essentially a gesture-based system for measuring short distances. Put the paired devices on two of your fingers, and they’ll give you a readout indicating the measurement in either metric or U.S. units. Has the potential to be a good strategy for people with dexterity disabilities; could be helpful to people with visual or cognitive disabilities if what seems to be a large-print display were also high-contrast, and if there were an audio output option as well.
Here’s the scoop:
We’re keeping an eye on the relevance to wheelchair users of the Roboscooper, which looks like a commercial variation of the iRobot Create modification for the Roomba. Roboscooper picks up objects and puts them in a “cargo bay” (unclear if this is a set area or can be specified by the user), or knocks them around (and out of the way?). We do like that it has a variety of clear spoken messages in response to a variety of situations, including encountering an object that’s too big or heavy, and that it can run either automatically or via remote control.
Yuban waiting for this
Fingerprint biometrics have been used for security for some time, but finally they’re being applied to something really important–coffee making. The Xelsis Digital ID saves preference information for up to six people, and brews your cup your way at the swipe of a finger. Could have implications for making other appliances easier to use, assuming you have both fingerprints and lots of (Star)bucks–the Xelsis will set you back $2,500.
Bornrich: Xelsis Digital ID Coffee Machine serves by fingerprint identification
Beam me up, Numi
Most of us have wallets or keychains bursting with loyalty and membership cards for various stores, and it doesn’t even take having a disability to experience difficulty finding and retrieving them when needed. Enter the Numi Key, which stores all your card information electronically, then lets you retrieve as needed and wirelessly transmit to a POS device. The display looks pretty legible (can we beg for a voice-output option in a future release?), and the buttons could well be tactilely discernable.
The Gadgeteer: Consolidate your loyalty cards into one device
Mind field
As usual, a proposed “thought-controlled technology” will probably be run in practice via other physical capabilities. That doesn’t mean we’re not looking forward to some of the hands-free environmental control strategies being developed by Japanese researchers, including the ability to have heaters and air conditioners automatically respond to changes in an individual’s body temperature. Cognito, ergo summer?