Student invents LED Crosswalk for the blind

"One night, I saw a visually impaired person crossing the zebra crosswalk, and unfortunately, a car came and ran him over. Since that time, I realized that for people with visual and hearing-impairment problems, the safety of crossing the road is really quite limited”, said Liwei Deng, a student 8th grade, from Taiwan, who loves to create innovations since he was 9 years old.

To enhance the security of crossroads, especially for the people with physical and perception disabilities, Liwei Deng started thinking of a solution: is it possible to turn the zebra crossing into an LED device to give sound/ light indications? With that idea in mind, he spent one year making it come true – the LED Crosswalk.

The innovated LED Crosswalk can display the color simultaneously with the traffic lights on the zebra crosswalk as well as the countdown of the green or red light in the vicinity. In addition, it has sound signals that would accelerate when the signal switch is approaching. “Besides for the disabled and blind people, the LED Crosswalk is also very convenient for pedestrians who want to see the signals more clearly, especially those who are used to looking down at their phone when waiting to cross the road.

“For the LED Crosswalk, the construction process is similar to conventional crosswalk. Another way is to use projection, in that case digging the road can be avoided”, said Deng.

Deng’s innovation has been granted a patent and has also won the gold award in an innovation competition hold in the UK, in 2015.

Adapted from: https://bit.ly/2HynWVT
https://youtu.be/TXID_Bx_IcA