Skip to main content

Wearable device lets visually impaired people sense their surroundings

guidesense guide radar
Guidesense
From self-driving scooters to bionic arms, wearable technology has the potential to drastically change the lives of disabled people for the better. And a team of engineers at VTT Technical Research Center of Finland has added another assistive device to the list — Guidesense.

Guidesense is a box-shaped device designed to be worn like a heart-rate monitor by visually impaired people. Using millimeter wave radar sensors, the device can detect obstacles in the environment — including thin branches and bushes — and relay that information back to the wearer via haptic and audio feedback.

The Guidesense concept spawned from a VTT meeting in which project lead Tero Kiuru and his colleagues were reviewing results of a high-frequency radio transmitter. “It seemed that human interaction caused interferences in the radio signal,” Kiuru told Digital Trends, “and one of my colleagues suggested that we could turn the idea around and use the radio transmitter for detecting things.”

Guidesense
Guidesense

After developing a prototype, Kiuru and his team tested the device on 25 visually impaired people, 14 of whom were blind, seven who were partially sighted, and four who were both deaf and blind. The results were overwhelmingly positive — 92 percent of the subjects said Guidesense helped them better perceive their environment and 80 percent felt more confident moving around by themselves. Nearly a third of the subjects said they would begin using the device immediately if possible.

But Guidesense isn’t perfect, as subjects were unsatisfied with distance controls and the haptic feedback. However, Kiuru said these can be addressed through software updates and by simply changing the location of the vibration sensors.

For now, Guidesense is intended for outdoor use, since the many obstacles found indoors would overload the sensors and make it difficult to discern the vibrations and audio feedback. The researchers hope to have a commercial product available by the end of 2017.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more