inSight

Re-imagining the White Cane for Visually Impaired Individuals through Technology

The Problem:

• Target Audience: Visually impaired individuals
• A small portion of Individuals who are visually impaired use the white cane
• The cane affects the behaviors of others
  • if they offer to help, sympathy, etc.
• Current devices/tools employed by the visually impaired include: guide dogs, friends/family, etc.
• Those visually impaired are unable to interact with screen based technology

Solution:

• A device/tool/service to assist visually impaired individuals
• A kinetic proximity sensor to detect how close an object is from a subject
• Utilizing a threshold to determine if the proximity is under a particular depth, if so, we alarm the user through a series of vibrations.
• Vibrations would be emitted through a smart watch or telephone.

Technical Difficulties

• All team members are beginners at coding
• Kinect is a relatively new device, so not much information is readily available
• Languages we used: JavaScript and C#
• No Athenahack mentors had experience with Kinect, only one Microsoft individual was fluent in Kinect.
• No Athenahack mentors had experience with programming Pebble Smartwatch Applications -- this led us to pivot towards notifying the user their proximity to an object through vibrations through mobile phones.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Creating a successful prototype to demonstrate our project
• Not giving up!
• Overcoming obstacles (time constraints, knowledge, resources, etc)
• Pivoting, and being open minded to new ideas and ways to improve our product.

What we learned

• Hackathons are cool!
• Kinetic, and how to program in C# with it
• C#, C++, JavaScript, Twilio, Express, and node.js
• How to pitch our product to judges
• How to create a server
• How to send text messages from a server
• Working with like-minded individuals
• Collaboration, Creativity,

What's next for inSight

• We hope to use the technology we've created to then condense the Kinect into a smaller device and turn it into a wearable.
• The technology employed in inSight can be used in other aspects such as Security.

Built With

• express.js
• kinect
• node.js
• sms-text-messaging
• twilio
• vibration