Blindness

There's no doubt that a standard white cane can be quite helpful, but it isn't all that … interactive. The Glide device certainly appears to be, however, as it verbally and physically guides blind users down city streets.

A team of researchers at Rice University has developed a haptic feedback vest and camera system for a blind dog known as Kunde. The vest helps guide the dog through daily obstacles and the hope is that it will soon do the same for other pups.

It’s not always to picture what’s going on while listening to sports on the radio – so spare a thought for vision-impaired people who don’t have options. Now they do: meet the OneCourt, a haptic feedback device that works like braille for sports.

While seeing-eye dogs can be very helpful to the blind, raising and training them is a long and expensive process. Scientists have therefore recently started investigating the possibility of outsourcing the job to dog-like quadruped robots.

It can be difficult for blind people to learn to read braille, as they don't have any way of seeing which character the dots that they're feeling represent. That's where the BrailleWear glove comes in, as it verbally tells them.

One of the leading causes of blindness, age-related macular degeneration causes the center of an older person's vision to become blurry or even completely absent. Arges glasses are designed to help, by relocating the unseen images.

Although many of us may have forgotten about Google Glass, the technology is now the base of a set of glasses designed to assist the blind. Known as Envision Glasses, they utilize AI to verbally tell their wearer what they're looking at.

Autonomous vehicles and robots navigate with sensors and cameras – but visually-impaired people still get by with canes and guide dogs. Now, engineers have developed a wearable AI system that tracks obstacles and describes a person’s surroundings.

Blind readers will likely be familiar with refreshable braille displays, in which raised dots rise and fall from a flat surface in order to form braille characters. A new material, however, could make such displays cheaper and more useful than ever.

​Haptic signing is a process in which a hearing, sighted person conveys information to a deaf and blind individual by touching their back or other parts of their body. It's effective, but what happens if the deafblind person wants to be more independent? New haptic-feedback clothing could help.

​Most people will agree that phone conversations are more awkward than face-to-face chats, since you can't gauge the other person's mood by seeing their facial expressions. This is a constant challenge for the blind, which is why Huawei has developed the "face-reading" Facing Emotions app.