What if you’re not that rich and you’re also colour blind? This remarkable speaker just presented his solution for at least one of these issues: the AUIRE device tells you what colour is in front of you. “A regular colour reader in Brazil costs $600. Mine is only $100.”
An open-source portable device that identifies colours and paper money at low cost.
Fernando Gil de Oliveira is a Master’s student in the School of Engineering at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a researcher at the Safety Analysis Group (GAS-USP) working on the Safety of Air Traffic systems and Appropriate Technology. He shared an invention that extends our senses. He co-developed this in AUIRE, a social enterprise that develops low-cost devices to assist the visually impaired. “I’ve become an engineer not only because I like to design things, but becauseI want people to use them.”
“Our solution is a portable identifier of colour and paper money at low cost. This device reads the colour of the object or the value of the dollar bill and says the name aloud. The software will handle our open-source hardware and keep our project up to date.” The bank notes in Brazil carry distinctively different colors, which allows the use of this property to identify them.
According to Fernando’s website, “Seeing colour is not just an aesthetic issue. People with visual impairments are unable to recognize colours or paper money. This capability is important for a good quality of life because it makes them independent and improves their self-esteem. However, this disability prevents them from working in many areas and, since most of these people are low income, they need a low cost solution.”
Fernando also told us that deaf people are working on this device, helping out the blind.
Background information on colour blindness:
Worldwide, there are 314 million people with some type of visual problem, and of these 45 million are blind (WHO, 2009). Furthermore, 87% of them live in developing or underdeveloped countries, 25 million in Brazil alone. About 29% of Americans with eye problems (7.25 million) live on less than one minimum wage per month (IBGE, 2009). In Brazil, colour identifiers cost from $600- 1200, which is a very high cost for most of the people who depend on it.
Further reading:
Fernando Gil on LinkedIn
Fernando Gil on Twitter
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