From the blind to the blind: how a patient developed AI Glasses-visual perception for the visually impaired

Back in 2003, Marx Melencio was buying fried rice, as he normally did, with his wife at a roadside store in Manila. All of a sudden, he was unexpectedly shot in the chest and the head in an apparently random attack, with the first bullet hitting him 3mm from his heart and the second missing his brain by 2mm but singed his optic nerve, rendering him blind.

A little while after, when he heard about Tesla, and how artificial intelligence could be used to detect certain objects [on the road], he could only think about how it wiould be fairly straightforward to convert it into detecting human-readable text and for that text to be converted into spoken audio. This made him realize that an old dream of his could become true, as he always dreamt of a way that could describe things that are happening around him at any moment.

This singular aspect is a very important part of being blind as people with impaired vision miss the independence to travel and walk around, take their pet dogs for a walk, buy things on their own or go to the ATM.

Because of this he created VIsION AI Glasses, a pair of 3D printed sunglasses with electronic components; and powered by machine learning, deep learning, and freeware, shared as an open source and DIY device. These glassed provide audible descriptions of visual scenes & objects in front of the user and reads out text in physical objects such as books or signboards. It also has audible & haptic feedback of distance-sensing capabilities with on-demand manual visual assistance via video call access to the user's peers and remote team of sighted PWD agents.

You can find the designs and software of this solution here https://github.com/MXGray/VIsION
This story was adapted from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39069057 and https://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/projects/129994-vision-ai-glasses-f...

The images were taken from https://www.awesomefoundation.org/en/projects/129994-vision-ai-glasses-f... and https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39069057 as we do not own any of them.