Boy! I'll tell you one thing. It never amazes me what people can think of. So many ideas out there!!!!!!
Here's a new idea I found online.
How would you like to wear a gadget that will take sounds and convert it into vibrations. Sounds bizarre right?
Let me elaborate a bit more. Parivash Ranjbar, an engineering researcher at Örebro University in Sweden, is developing a "super" gadget that will translate sounds into vibrations.
"Deaf blind people are used to getting information about their surroundings from vibration. Some people say they can tell which of their children is approaching from vibrations on the floor or they know when water starts to boil in a pot by the vibration it makes."
However, the problem for Deaf-Blind people is "they are always surprised by events and cannot plan for them. They cannot hear somebody approaching until they are close enough to smell the person's perfume or to touch them and by that time it is too late to decide how to prepare."
In other words, the gadget will help Deaf-Blind individuals become more aware of their surroundings and be more respnsive to whatever situations. http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/report_super-gadget-allows-deaf-blind-people-to-hear-with-skin_1336700
Now what is the next innovation?
Saturday, January 23, 2010
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How marketable do you really think this would be though? It should be integrated in something we already use like phones.
ReplyDeleteGood questions.
ReplyDeleteMhmm. I am assuming our phones will need to be a lot smarter than it is now to be able to do "sounds to vibrations" translation service. For instance, we can do speech-to-text and text-to-speech through google voice, but that's still an online service. It's not a service the phone itself can offer. (It's not embedded).
And speaking of "marketable," I am under the impression that Parivash Ranjbar doesn't care about becoming rich. Instead, he just wants to provide a service that'll benefit others. I have a good example... BRAILLE.. We assume every Blind person knows Braille, but the reality is only 10% of the Blind population knows it. That doesn't sound very marketable, yet it's still here for nearly 200 years. :)
Again, good questions!!!!