Picking out clothes for the day and assembling ingredients for breakfast is part of most people’s routine and at times can be stressful. Now imagine digging through your closet, trying to discern whether the shirt you’ve put on is bright red or brown, foraging through the pantry for breakfast or making sure you have the correct medication without the benefit of eyesight. Sounds unbelievably stressful, right?
A partnership between the U.K.-based Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) and London-based company Mantra Lingua has yielded a solution to the dilemma. As discussed in a BBC News article, the PenFriend allows blind shoppers to “read” labels by passing the pen-sized instrument across a special label, which then reads its contents aloud (most likely via headphones) to the user.
The labels are embedded with tiny MP3 files that, for example, say “crunchy peanut butter” when a blind shopper passes his or her pen across the label on a jar of crunchy peanut butter. RNIB associate John Godber explains how the new technology helps him out in the video below:
It can be used for virtually anything and the user can encode the labels him or herself, in his or her own voice, as the article explains:
“It uses optical identification technology (OID) to print microdots on to adhesive labels which are then read by the scanner in the tip of the PenFriend. This in turn triggers an MP3 file, usually of the user’s own voice, giving a spoken description of the item that is labeled.”
A similar concept has been tried before, but it used the more expensive RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology. Microdots are much cheaper, thus making this practical enough to label just about anything.
By Steve Tanner for Tonic, the “good news” site
Photo courtesy of Tonic
