Sahaya Kit

• 

  Basic assembly of prototype for testing

• 

  Basic assembly of prototype for testing

Inspiration

India has about 1 crore deaf and blind people (Census 2011), 70% of them in rural areas, and about 1 in 3 deaf or blind children aged 5 to 19 is out of school. Assistive tools are costly, need internet, and rarely support Tamil or Hindi.

What it does

One low-cost classroom device with two modes. Deaf mode: listens to the teacher and shows live captions. Blind mode: reads textbook pages and the board aloud.

How we built it

An Arduino UNO Q controls the system. An ESP32-CAM captures the page, OCR.space extracts the text, and ElevenLabs text-to-speech reads it aloud. A microphone feeds ElevenLabs Scribe for live captions. An 18650 battery and a small solar panel power it.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating the UNO Q, ESP32-CAM, microphone and speaker into one pipeline Getting clear images from a low-cost camera for accurate OCR Keeping delay low while using cloud APIs Accomplishments that we're proud of A working end-to-end prototype for both modes on low-cost hardware One device serving two disability groups A design built for rural schools: low cost and solar-assisted power

What we learned

Accessibility tools must be designed around cost, power and connectivity from the start Cloud APIs validate the idea fast, but rural use needs on-device models Microphone distance, camera angle and lighting decide accuracy

What's next for Sahaya Kit

Replace the cloud APIs with on-device models for offline use, add Tamil and Hindi translation, haptic bands and a student app with a teacher dashboard, then pilot in one classroom with a school or NGO

Built With

• 18650-battery
• arduino-uno-q
• elevenlabs
• elevenlabs-scribe
• elevenlabs-text-to-speech
• esp32-cam
• ocr
• ocr.space
• python
• speech-to-text
• stm32
• text-to-speech
• wi-fi