Many of us take something as simple as seeing a rainbow or putting a spoon in our mouths for granted. But what if you or someone you love has a disorder, injury or a disability that impairs their ability to do these tasks?
There's some really cool new technology out there that's helping make the world a brighter and more accessible space for our children and other loved ones with blindness, colour blindness, tremors, paralysis, mobility issues, or speech disorders. Here are some of the interesting ones we've seen lately!
This robotic utensil helps people who have trouble feeding themselves independently due to tremors or mobility issues. You may have heard about Liftware before; Google recently acquired Liftware, and supposedly they've made many improvements to the technology!
Liftware has two different utensils with swappable spoon/fork heads. One that keeps the spoon or fork level at any angle. The other counteracts as much as 70% of tremors in the hand to hold the utensil steady.
If you've never seen the vlogger who saw purple for the very first time (warning: awed NSFW expletives) then you're in for a treat. The EnChroma Glasses help filter colours so that people with many types of colourblindness can separate and see them more clearly, and in full detail. There's tons of videos on YouTube that will make you cry!
This amazing software allows people with limited movement (like spinal cord injuries or paralysis) control a smartphone completely with movements of their head (which acts the same as the swipe of a finger). It's an interface built onto an unlocked GSM Android phone, so you can use many android apps (and even games!) as a regular user would.
This is a high-performance and extremely reliable refreshable Braille display for the blind. It connects easily using Bluetooth or USB cables to many devices, including iPhones, iPads, other smartphones, PCs, and PDAs and converts the text on the device's display into braille for the user. Users can also navigate on their devices using Braille Edge 40's built-in buttons.
But it's not just a controller-type device. It also has built-in apps like alarms, notepads, calculators, clocks, stopwatches and countdown timers. And it has some built-in storage capacity, like a USB key.
The inability to communicate needs and wants clearly is an incredible frustration. Talkitt is an application to help translate unintelligible pronunciation by learning its users speech patterns and creating a personal dictionary. Over time, it learns and translates into speech we can understand. The project is still being listed as in-development but it met its crowdfunding goal, so hopefully we see some fruits of their labour soon!
RELATED: Teen Designs Game-Changing Stroller
Printer-friendly version