OrCam launches seeing-eye device to worldwide market
OrCam
OrCam, (Israel), a start up that has been in business since 2010, has released their seeing-eye device and are seeing their product make a global impact.
OrCam uses advanced computer vision to help the visually impaired and blind regain the functionalities that were lost.
OrCam harnesses the power of Artificial Vision to compensate for lost visual abilities. It is a sensor that sees what is in front of you, understands what information you seek and provides it to you through a bone-conduction earpiece.
OrCam reads, recognizes faces, identifies objects, products and places, locates bus numbers and monitors traffic lights.
To teach the device something new is just as simple: for an item shake it, for a place or face wave your hand. When OrCam sees these gestures it will instruct you in real time on how to store the item.
Live video from the camera feeds into a smartphone-size device in the user’s pocket, which processes the data and sends an audio snippet saying what it sees to the bone-conduction speaker in the user’s ear. Because the video feed is processed in the pocket instead of in the cloud like many mobile apps do, response times are quicker.
The current version of the tool only supports English, but the 20-person team is working on incorporating other European languages.
“As the world population ages, we will see an increase in the visually impaired,” said Cheri Wiggs, a director at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. “At this point, we aren’t preventing or curing blindness so any new development in assistive devices for visually impaired is very important.”
Manufacturing is beeing moved from Israel to China due to high demand.
Source: Orcam
