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USC: GUIDE VEST
Product: Vest with monitors to help blind people navigate
Inventor: Gerard Medioni
Year Developed: 2010
Location: USC
What was the idea that led to the creation of the technology?
Gerard Medioni: Jim Weiland from the biomedical engineering department and I talked about what could be done to help blind people move around. He had a bright student, Vivek Pradeep, who was also interested, but knew nothing about vision. So, I educated Vivek about vision, and we came up with a concept on paper, and Vivek became a vision expert and implemented the concept.
What Is It?
The system is composed of a set of two cameras attached to a person’s head, either mounted on a helmet or as a pair of glasses. The computer system fuses these two image streams to produce a 3-D view of the world. As the person moves, the system registers the partial 3-D views into a unified 3-D map. This step is called Slam, for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Based on this map, the system classifies areas as safe for traversal or as obstacles. As the person approaches an obstacle, the system sends a signal indicating that the person should either sidestep or reorient himself. The signal is transmitted through a wireless interface to a vest worn by the user. The vest has four micromotors, similar to the ones on a cell phone, one on each shoulder and one on each hip. The motor vibrates on the shoulder to indicate turning in that direction, and the motor vibrates on the hip to indicate sidestepping in that direction.
What were the biggest challenges?
This had never been done before, and existing “solutions” were either inadequate or designed without regard to the end users. Having Vivek being a double major in biomedical engineering and computer science was critical, as he was able to understand what was feasible or not, and implement and test it with real patients. We are still in the application phase and have not created a company.
Why was it born at a university?
It is too “blue sky” for a company to devote dedicated resources for three or more years. It was far from obvious that we would succeed. Also, it was not clear that patients would like it.
How could it change society?
The societal impact could be enormous. There are millions of blind people worldwide, and the only true solution, a Seeing Eye Dog, can only produce 7,000 dogs a years, at a very high cost.
What’s next?
What we currently have is a prototype only. Significant effort still needs to be expanded to miniaturize, robust-ify and product-ize it. The good news is that blind patients do like the system and find it helpful.
