How Technology Can Help the Blind Set Their Own Expectations

How Technology Can Help the Blind Set Their Own Expectations

from theatlantic.com

When one hopeful student in Michigan who happened to be blind first stepped onto his college campus, he worried that his blindness wouldn’t allow for a full, autonomous experience—that someone would always take his arm to guide him, no matter how badly he wanted to be independent. So he turned to an app called Be My Eyes, which connects blind and low-vision people with volunteers around the globe who describe their surroundings via video call while directing them toward their destination or otherwise helping them navigate.

“After using this app ... I realized that I felt a true sense of independence,” he said in his feedback. “It was a truly groundbreaking moment for me.”

Be My Eyes is the kind of service that only became feasible with the rise of smartphones. And because its connections span the globe, they’re contingent on clear, high-quality video and lightning-fast internet speeds—in other words, reliable networks. Qualcomm, a mobile technologies inventor, has been a leader in iterating the next mobile network, 5G, which could hold the key to making those connections faster, more reliable, and more beneficial to the blind community. As Alexander Hauerslev Jensen, community director for Be My Eyes, puts it: “We are helping people all over the world, so to be better connected is very central to what we do.”

5G means more than just another network. It will turbocharge mobile connection and data transfer speeds, sure, but it’s also engineered to support unprecedented numbers of connected devices in the Internet of Things and to achieve unprecedented internet speeds to enable new VR and AR experiences. Sherif Hanna, a director of product marketing at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., says the potential use cases for 5G are practically endless. As a leader in the development of mobile networks as far back as 2G, Qualcomm has spent years researching, developing, and standardizing the technology behind 5G, and has already proven the capabilities of 5G modems, or chips, in smartphones. Results have been so promising that Qualcomm expects 5G devices to be available as early as the first half of 2019.

“The 5G devices will be able to get somewhere between 10 and 20 times the speeds that 4G devices typically get today,” Hanna says. “We expect a lot of evolution in the things that people can do with their mobile devices.”

For the blind community, that evolution could be vital to new forms of independence. According to Hanna: “5G becomes an enabler for essentially detecting the real-world environment for the blind person and helping them get guidance in real time as they go about their day.”

Technology that assists independence is key, explains Anil Lewis, who serves as executive director of the Jernigan Institute at the National Federation of the Blind and oversees the development of products geared toward blind independence. “It’s not that the person would not be able to do something if the technology didn’t exist,” he says. “[But] technology is enhancing our ability to live.”
Take Aipoly, a free smartphone app that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify objects in the phone’s camera view—all without another human on the line. Its algorithm is trained every time it’s used and can be corrected by users when it’s wrong. Wearable technology also has the potential to provide the blind with reliable yet unobtrusive assistance: The Sunu Band uses a combination of sonar technology and GPS to warn its wearer before bumping into something, and the Dot watch is designed to give the blind a sense of independent control over the time in their day, while also featuring a braille interface that can connect to the internet.

Devices like these that capitalize on AI show how new technologies can be capable of assisting the visually impaired even without being connected to the internet, whether via text-to-speech features, object and spatial recognition, or augmented reality for the partially blind. Gary Brotman, a director of AI and machine learning product management at Qualcomm, explains that on-device AI technologies are potentially vital in providing smart assistance to the blind. “There’s so much promise in being able to provide better tools that are easy to use,” he says, pointing out that “the utility of that device still has to be there, independent of a cloud source.”

But it’s the marriage of AI and 5G that opens the door to the most exciting possibilities, and Qualcomm specializes in both these technologies. Hanna and Brotman see the two dovetailing to drive a new era of connectivity. “You can think of 5G as this invisible link that ties what’s happening locally on device to the cloud,” Hanna says. “For a lot of applications in the future, there could be a mix of technologies enabling new use cases. Providing help to blind people is just one of them.”
The demand for better, more intuitive, and turnkey technologies that can communicate information in blind-accessible ways will only continue to grow—research predicts that global blindness will triple by 2050. But this demand can be met. As innovative technologies proliferate, they’ll help spur inventive thinking and provide new ways for people with disabilities to enjoy more convenient, connected, and independent lives.

“Every day we raise expectations because it’s the low expectations that create obstacles between blind people and our dreams,” Lewis says. “We believe we can live the life we want, and blindness is not what holds us back.”