IIT-Kanpur develops haptic smartwatch for blind and visually impaired – Instances of India

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur has introduced partnership with Ambrane India for mass manufacturing of “haptic smartwatch for the blind and visually impaired”. The haptic smartwatch is available in two variants and has 12 touch-sensitive hour markers organized over the dial face. Customers might be required to scan the markers with their fingers. The smartwatch has been developed by Professor Siddhartha Panda and Vishwaraj Srivastava from the Nationwide Centre for Versatile Electronics at IIT Kanpur.
Watches which can be presently out there for the blind and the visually impaired could be broadly labeled into tactile, speaking, vibration, and braille-based. These watches have their limitations. There’s a threat of needle breakage in tactile watches, equally speaking watches don’t provide a non-public mode of communication. As forvibration watches, they’re difficult whereas braille watches are costly. The haptic watch developed at IIT Kanpur goals to deal with the drawbacks of all these typical applied sciences and provide a seamless expertise to the wearer.
How the watch works
The haptic watch developed at IIT Kanpur has 12 contact delicate hour markers organized over the dial face. The consumer is required to scan the markers along with his/her fingers. For example, to test the time of three:40, the third and eighth marker within the watch might be termed because the energetic markers. The vibration pulse will get generated on touching the energetic markers. A protracted pulse on 3 will point out hours and a brief pulse on 8 will point out minutes for checking the time of three:40.
The watch is a mixture of tactile and vibration watches. The complexity of vibration watch producing greater than 20 pulses has been diminished to 2 pulses, and the delicate nature of a tactile watch is eradicated, thus leading to a simple-to-use, personal, inexpensive, and strong watch.
How the smartwatch solves the drawbacks of conventional watches
The smartwatch mannequin is provided with good options to point well being parameters similar to coronary heart fee, step depend, hydration reminder and good timer to set brief timer through the use of easy gesture.
The present smartwatches for the blind and visually impaired use audio-based output and lacks privateness. The IIT Kanpur-developed smartwatch, which provides a tactile-haptic interface for show of time and well being parameters, addresses these drawbacks. The usage of modern haptic icons makes it straightforward to navigate the menu and a easy gesture just like the double-tap can open a selected well being monitoring app. These numbers are communicated in an identical means because the time.