EquiCompass

Inspiration

Volunteering at the Ashadeep Blind School in the summer of 21 for the 9th year was a typical day until something extraordinary happened. I met a girl named Jiya. She was a brilliant student who aspired to be a math professor, but that day her life came to a grinding halt when she learned that she had diabetic retinopathy, a condition that damages vision. Her loss of vision had a negative effect on her education; she struggled to participate in the class due to the lack of infrastructure to engage and learn math inside a classroom and soon she started to lose hope of having a career in mathematics.

The industry size for assistive technologies for visually impaired is $3.6 Billion, and it is expected to become a $13.8 Billion industry by 2030. There is clearly a huge market for a one of its kind product. We know people need what we are making because there are dreamers like Jiya who don't want to give up their dreams in front of a disease.

What it does

Our educational system continues to shift towards a visual-centric system of learning in a digital world surrounded by devices connected to the internet. Visually impaired students have a difficult time navigating this visual-centric educational model. They rely on pure imagination, audio transcription, and note-takers as they lack the access to real-time information. There are 295 million people globally who have to limit their potential just because there are no proper technologies available. Looking at which we came with a solution we call EquiCompass. It provides real-time 3-Dimensional braille transcription with a latency of fewer than 10 milliseconds. The device consists of a transparent plastic box containing a grid of small pins that can be raised and lowered to form braille characters. A user can read the braille by running their fingers over the top of the box. The device can translate text into braille in real-time as it is captured through a camera. The device can also be used to read e-books, websites, and other digital text. We can sell a smart braille display system to universities and colleges. The problem is that visually impaired students have a difficult time learning and comprehending in a classroom, as they do not have access to the information that is being hand written on the whiteboard. We solve this problem by using our state of the art technology such as handwritten text recognition, to perform real time transcribing and translation in under 10 ms which has never been performed before.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we frequently ran into was inaccuracy in recognising some math symbols and constants.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We aim to bridge the gap of eduaction for the visually impaired and students with low vision and that's our biggest accomplishment!

What's next for EquiCompass

Future Scope/Ecosystem:

EquiAudio: Transcribe audio to braille in real time EquiStick: A cane that detects objects and helps in navigation EquiGlasses: A device that can process sensory and image data to render artificial image EquiGlove: A glove that can sense and relay information about the objects a person is about to touch or in their proximity

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• estuary
• estuary-alpha
• estuaryapi
• python