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Published on September 25, 2007

With the development of the smart cane, the blind will have a much safer life as while they're walking on the road, the cane detects objects in front and warns them through a vibration in the handle.

The beauty of this development is that the cane can detect objects at high levels, which other electronic canes normally cannot do, said Apichet Mongkolpornudom, one of the development team from King Mongkut Institute of Technology at Lad Krabang.

The development project recently received the first prize at the Embedded Systems on New Industrial Design Camp and Contest 2007 held by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) in cooperation with the Thai Embedded Systems Association (Tesa), the Industrial Designer Society and Thailand Science Park.

"We designed the cane with the idea to give a much safer life to blind people and make a new walking companion for them," the developer said.

Realising that the conventional cane for the blind could not detect objects at higher levels, the team developed a cane equipped with ultrasonic sensors to detect objects at levels from waist to head.

The developer said since canes for the blind mostly detected only objects on the ground, often the blind did not know that there were objects ahead which were higher.

To tackle this problem, the team designed the cane to be able to detect all objects, even a mirror set at 30 degrees, and if it finds any objects in front, it warns the user with a vibration so the objects can be easily avoided.

Apichet said the team had included ultrasonic sensors in the upper part of the cane, allowing the cane to detect objects 10 to 80 centimetres ahead. "We designed the new smart cane to act as eyes for the blind. Even though the blind have lost their sight, they still have something to lead the way," the developer said.

The smart cane is designed to use batteries and the team said that with its energy-saving design, the cane could be used for a whole day.

"We designed the system to save energy, so if there is no activity for 15 seconds the system switches to standby mode," the developer said.

The smart cane is expected to sell at Bt1,800 and the team also plans to develop a business to bring the product into commercial production.

Apart from the smart cane, the contest also recognised a wireless electronic labelling system from a Kasetsart University team as the first runner-up and a Braille computer notebook from the Prince of Songkla University team as second runner-up.

The wireless electronic labelling system allows retailers to automatically change product prices from a central point. Rather than allocating many staff to change the paper price labels on product shelves, the new system uses electronic labels and it allows the store staff to change the price displayed on the tags remotely.

The system uses wireless technology to send information to each electronic label receiver so once the price is changed at the server, all changes are sent wirelessly to each receiver within a few minutes. The system is expected to improve efficiency in price management at retail stores while reducing operating costs.

The second runner-up was the development of a notebook for the blind. Unlike other notebook computers, which are equipped with dozens of buttons, the notebook comes with only eight buttons with a space bar to facilitate easy typing by the blind, allowing them to use the notebook to key in information in Braille.

Documents can be printed either in Braille or normal text formats.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation