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Five innovations for Low Vision Awareness Month
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February is Low Vision Awareness Month and the National Eye Institute is using this time to highlight new technologies and tools working to help the 4.1 million Americans living with low vision or blindness.
First is a co-robotic cane developed by Cang Ye, PhD, of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock which is designed to help those with low vision navigate indoors. Equipped with a 3-D camera, motorized roller tip, microphone and speech recognition system, wireless earpiece, and credit-card sized computer (with pre-loaded floor plans) the cane provides feedback about a user’s surrounding environment.
The second is a robotic glove also developed by Ye which helps those with low vision locate and grasp small objects more quickly. The fingerless glove device uses a back-surface camera and speech recognition system to identify the desired object and guide the user’s hand. An electrotactile system developed by Ye’s colleague Yantao Shen, PhD, uses cylindrical pins to indicate in which direction to move the user’s hand.
A third innovation, developed by James Coughlan, PhD, and colleagues at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, uses a smartphone app to help with street crossing. With GPS, computer vision, and a geographic information system, the app helps users identify a safe crossing location and stay within the crosswalk.
A fourth system called CamIO (camera input-output) conceived by Joshua Miele, PhD, and developed by Coughlan helps users explore objects in a natural way. The technology works by holding a finger stationary on a 3-D or 2-D object which signals the system to provide an audio label of the location in question or an enhanced image on a laptop screen.
Finally, to help those suffering from a loss of peripheral vision, Eli Pelo, OD, has developed lenses constructed of many adjacent 1-millimeter wide prisms that expand the visual field while preserving central vision. Currently, the multiplexing prism Pelo designed expands one’s field of view by about 30 degrees, but he and his colleagues have developed a prototype that achieves a 45-degree visual field.