Visually impaired or blind people can be oriented and navigate crowds using a new harness, dubbed Biped One, which uses the same technology that allows self-driving cars to drive around obstacles.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, this harness, which is worn around the neck, informs the person of the presence of obstacles in their path, thanks to the beeps it emits with connected headphones.
"It does a bit of what an autonomous vehicle does, but on a pedestrian scale," says Maël Fabien, CEO and co-founder of Biped.ai, a company present at the Viva Tech show in Paris.
Headphones that leave your ears free
"We detect obstacles, cars, pedestrians, pedestrian crossings and we warn the user with 3D sounds, a musical note for each type of object around the user, directly played in the helmet that the user wears", specifies the Breton co-creator of this invention.
Sounds from the Biped One device are emitted through a bone conduction headset that leaves the ears free to hear noises all around.
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It was during a hackathon that the developers of Biped met and understood that they shared the same frustration: autonomous vehicles benefited from a technological solution while blind and visually impaired people still walk with a cane.
“I used to see a lot of visually impaired people, people who had trouble knowing when to cross the street when there were bicycles or electric cars passing by.
I thought that was exactly what the robots we were developing could do, and that's how the project, the fusion of the two, was born,” said the engineer.
More than 100 beta testers participated in the development of the device, which will go on sale in September at a price of 2,990 euros.
