Eye See: The Innovative Helmet to Help the Blind

Five students from the Kunming University of Science and Technology, a college of south-east China, have been working for a whole year for a really interesting project. The goal was to develop a tool that could help and support both blind and visually impaired people. Eye See is a helmet whose core component is a laser radar, similar to those used by the automated driving systems mounted on new generation cars: it can perform a full 360 omnidirectional scan, identifying and signaling obstacles within 3 meters by means of a special acoustic signal. All this happens thanks to a small Artificial Intelligence that is equipped with the helmet, which can recognize the colors of clothes worn by the person who is confronted by the recognition of an image, or to hypothesize the age of the person, making a verbal description. This helps to help not only those who do not see, but also people who are visually impaired in reading books, magazines, and posters.