Keisuke Shimakage from the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences in Japan designed a pair of smart glasses to help people who have difficulty reading. Sufferers of dyslexia often have difficulty with specific language skills such as reading and pronouncing words. While the OTON GLASS smart glasses will not solve these problems, they will help sufferers by identifying words and saying them through an earpiece.
The glasses have two small cameras and an earpiece, which connect to a computer (RPI) installed in them. The lens is half mirror and reflects the user’s eye movements. One camera tracks the eye movements and detects blinks as a trigger, while the other camera captures words. The computer processes these images and detects words. The artificial voice technology changes the words into sound and reads out the words for the user through the earpiece.
The glasses are not ready for the market yet and are still undergoing tests. The current OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the glasses can change words into sound but cannot recognise every character. The updated prototype will have a remote supporter on hand should OTON GLASS’ RPI struggle to recognise certain words.
The design was a national runner-up for the 2016 James Dyson Award. Shimakage and his team plan to keep developing new prototypes in order to truly help those who need it.
