Prof Mahmoud Moghavvemi, at the University of Malaya, has designed a gadget aimed at facilitating the movement of visually impaired people.

The Comprehensive Electronic Travel Aid For The Visually Impaired, aka the smart cane, uses “bat technology” that sends out ultrasound signals. “When the signal hits an object, part of it bounces back. We take the received signal, strengthen it and we have a system in the cane that can translate it into distance ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ how far the object is from the cane,” explains Moghavvemi.

When users approach an object less than three and a half metres away a pre-recorded voice says ‘watch out’, closer than that and it says ‘beware’ and when they are about to hit something it says ‘danger’.

If the user is deaf as well, the cane has a vibration mode that will alert the deaf when they are about to bump into something.

The cane comes with a bus number recognition feature. For this to work, a small transmitter needs to be inserted in buses and set according to the bus number. When the bus approaches a stop, the number is transmitted to a receiver in the cane via radio frequency. Users only have to programme the number of the buses they want in their receiver and the cane will do the rest.

Via Gizmos for Geeks < The Star Online.