CRI听力: Seeing Hand Helps Blind People

A team of scientists in the US has created a robotic hand that can help blind people "see." The amazing talking device can identify objects by touch.

Our reporter Li Dong has the details.

The "Helping Hand" is a glove-like device designed to help a blind person recognize and distinguish between different products.

Strapped around the hand of its user, it works by speaking out the name of the object with which it comes into contact.
Each object has been previously tagged and associated with an audio file that identifies its nature and content.

Vincent Martin, a blind graduate student at Georgia Tech and a research scientist at the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, wears the "Helping Hand" in an experiment at Georgia Tech University.

Martin lightly touches different soda bottles, all of the same size and same shape. Thanks to the device he is able to distinguish the three different flavors contained in each bottle, by hearing a voice telling him what's inside whenever he touches the special tag on the bottles.

The same happens when his hand dressed with the device comes into contact with identically shaped salt and pepper containers and with medicine bottles.

Martin says the "Helping Hand" would make a big difference in his home life and help a great deal to simplify it.

"I have 1,500 CD's, I have a variety of clothing articles. Anything that you can put a tag on and be able to distinguish, without having to put a lot of labels on it makes it quicker."

Martin adds that the device has another practical function.

"I'm married to someone sighted, who can see things and has a tendency to move things. So where I think it's going to be is not always where it's going to be. The "Helping Hand" would provide the identification to find it when it moves ten feet, five feet or five inches."

Marc Lawson is a Human-Computer Interaction graduate student at Georgia Tech University and is one of the creators of the "Helping Hand", along with Ellen Yi-Luen Do, the Associate Professor at Georgia Tech's College of Architecture Computing.

Lawson says that he fell upon the "Helping Hand" project almost by chance when he happened to associate a wave file that said "book" with a Bible. That prompted him to start tagging different objects and associate sounds with them.

Since virtually any product could be tagged, the "Helping Hand" can be applied to a countless range of items and adapted to individual needs, from home to work.

"One practical use for the Helping Hand product would be in a grocery store. A number of chains out there are tagging their products with radio frequency IDs and, provided that all the items in the store were using this, then it could be something that could be feasibly used by people who are visually impaired."

The devise costs about 60 dollars-a relatively low price that could help make it available to a larger number of people.
Lawson's team is already working on putting the "Helping Hand" on the market, something that, he says, could happen as early as 2012.

For CRI, I am Li Dong.