Blind girl, seven, banned from using white stick at school as it is 'health and safety risk'

PRI wrote:How do you make walking easier for people who are blind?
By Rezwan Islam

Students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi are making an impression with a new invention called the SmartCane. It enhances one of the world's oldest instruments — the walking stick — by adding sonar to help visually impaired people walk on their own.

That's a big concern in India, which is home to one out of every three people who are blind in the world — an estimated 15 million people, including two million children.

People who are visually impaired face no shortage of problems in India, where living with disabilities can be especially challenging. Pedestrians are often forced off of sidewalks that are cluttered with vendors, animals and other obstacles. And because of the difficulty of moving indepedently, accessing services is also difficult. For example, the Blind People's Association of India estimates that only about five percent of the country's blind children are registered for education.

Blind people typically use canes, of course, but the traditional cane can't detect objects higher than the waist. There have been other innovations like Roshni, an indoor navigation system that was also developed by students at IIT Delhi, but logistical issues make large-scale production impractical. That means inventing an affordable and simple tool to aid the visually impaired has been a priority for many researchers across the world.

Professor Meenakshi Balakrishnan, a computer engineer at IIT Delhi, led a team of researchers and students to develop SmartCane, which launched last March. The device emits ultrasound waves to detect nearby obstacles and vibrates to warn the user of anyting in its path. It copies submarines and animals like bats, which also emit sonar calls into their surroundings and guide themselves using echoes. The vibration ensures that the user is warned of obstacles; a sound alert may not be audible on noisy streets.