Skip to main content

GiveVision partners with Sony to develop and manufacture wearables for people with visual impairments

GiveVision, the U.K. startup creating wearable technology to help “restore” sight to people with visual impairments, is partnering with Sony (via the Sony UK Technology Centre) to develop and manufacture its next generation device.

Specifically, GiveVision says it will be working with Sony UK Tec to help bring to market a new, lightweight version of the startup’s “SightPlus” device. This will including condensing its existing “vision enhancing” technology into a single pair of glasses. The idea is to make it a lot more practical and less socially awkward for the person wearing the device.

“The collaboration with Sony will add to the expertise of the existing GiveVision team, and provide world leading technology expertise around camera, display and smartphone innovation, as well as a global manufacturing footprint,” says GiveVision.

As part of the collaboration, GiveVision will be relocating its design office to the Sony UK Tec facility in Wales in the U.K. To date, GiveVision has received support from Telefonica, Pfizer and the NHS.

GiveVision CEO Stan Karpenko tells me that around 1 in 3 people lose their sight by the age of 65 to conditions such as age-related macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy. And that for those affected, there is currently no cure and very few options to restore vision.

“Those that have been affected suffer immensely every single day,” he says. “But with better ‘tools’ we can make them suffer less. We can help them to be more independent which will improve their quality of life significantly.

“At GiveVision we have developed a pair of electronic glasses that helps patients with even the most severe cases of un-curable sight loss to see clearly again by projecting a video of real-world into the working part of the retina”.

To that end, a recent study by Moorfields Eye Hospital found that almost 70% of users of the SightPlus prototype device reported that their visual acuity was enhanced to 0.2 logMAR or better, which I’m told is close to a normal level of vision.

“59 out of the 60 trial participants (98%) found that SightPlus improved their visual acuity by an average of six lines on a sight test chart (31 EDTRS letters or 0.6 logMar),” says the startup.

However, one of the biggest challenges that needed to be overcome is distilling the tech down to something that is actually wearable and still works. Consumer VR headsets not only remain quite bulky and heavy but they don’t provide a wide enough field of view to enable a visually impaired person to see.

“This is why this partnership with Sony is so important,” adds Karpenko. “We can manufacture a medical device that has 100 degree-plus field of view, and that actually works for the visually impaired, while looking like a pair of designer shades!”.



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2w3VYAY

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How To Play Doom – And More – On An NES

Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to include the NES even though the system definitely doesn’t have enough capability to run it without special help. And if you want your own Doom NES cartridge, this video will show you how to build it . We featured the original build from [TheRasteri] a while back which goes into details about how it’s possible to run such a resource-intensive game on a comparatively weak system. You just have to enter the cheat code “RASPI”. After all the heavy lifting is done, it’s time to put it into a realistic-looking cartridge. To get everything to fit in the donor cartridge, first the ICs in the cartridge were removed (except the lockout IC) and replaced with custom ROM chips. Some modifica...

Try NopSCADlib for your Next OpenSCAD Project

Most readers of this site are familiar by now with the OpenSCAD 3D modeling software, where you can write code to create 3D models. You may have even used OpenSCAD to output some STL files for your 3D printer. But for years now, [nophead] has been pushing OpenSCAD further than most, creating some complex utility and parts libraries to help with modeling, and a suite of Python scripts that generate printable STLs, laser-ready DXFs, bills of material, and human-readable assembly instructions complete with PNG imagery of exploded-view sub-assemblies. Recently [nophead] tidied all of this OpenSCAD infrastructure up and released it on GitHub as NopSCADlib . You can find out more by browsing through the example projects and README file in the repository, and by reading the announcement blog post on the HydraRaptor blog . Some functionality highlights include: a large parts library full of motors, buttons, smooth rod, et cetera many utility functions to help with chamfers, fillets, precis...

The Newbie’s Guide To JTAG

Do you even snarf? If not, it might be because you haven’t mastered the basics of JTAG and learned how to dump, or snarf, the firmware of an embedded device. This JTAG primer will get you up to snuff on snarfing, and help you build your reverse engineering skills. Whatever your motivation for diving into reverse engineering devices with microcontrollers, JTAG skills are a must, and [Sergio Prado]’s guide will get you going. He starts with a description and brief history of the Joint Test Action Group interface, from its humble beginnings as a PCB testing standard to the de facto standard for testing, debugging, and flashing firmware onto devices. He covers how to locate the JTAG pads – even when they’ve been purposely obfuscated – including the use of brute-force tools like the JTAGulator . Once you’ve got a connection, his tutorial helps you find the firmware in flash memory and snarf it up to a file for inspection, modification, or whatever else you have planned. We always apprec...