The Magic Glove

The Magic Glove - Top View
The Magic Glove - Bottom View
The Magic Glove - Front View

💡 Inspiration

The healthcare industry has an extreme lack of assistive devices for people who are blind or visually impaired.
Only 2% to 8% of people who are visually impaired use white canes. From our research we learned that many people prefer not to use a cane because of the stigma associated with carrying a cane or because they do not find a personal need for that specific device. We wanted to create a sleek device that can be used with or without a cane for 100% of the low vision community.
Many assistive technological devices are expensive, costing thousands of dollars, so we attempted to create an affordable device, accessible to everyone.

⚙️ What it does

The Magic Glove is a multi-feature, affordable, and innovative assistive device for people who are blind or visually impaired. The sleek design is compact with three useful features: 1) Spatial Orientation: Notifies the user of nearby obstructions to avoid accidents or tripping. 2) Colour Recognition: Helps users with daily life tasks including grocery shopping, clothing organizing, and more. 3) Light Detection: Notifies people who are totally blind (18% of the blind community) and cannot perceive light if the lights in a room are on or off.

🔨 How we built it

The Magic Glove uses a Raspberry Pi 3 microprocessor.
To create our color detection feature we used OpenCV to develop an algorithm for recognizing colors and we used a Raspberry Pi Camera to get image input.
To develop the spatial recognition feature we used an Ultrasonic Range Sensor to detect nearby obstructions by sending pulses and a buzzer to notify the user.
The light detection feature uses photoresistors to detect if lights are off or on in a room.
Additionally, Google Cloud Platform Text-to-Speech is used to communicate with the users.

⛰️ Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge we ran into while creating The Magic Glove was interfacing with the Raspberry Pi 3 microprocessor. Connecting a speaker to the Raspberry Pi using its command line interface consumed the last 5-8 hours of our hacking as we learned Raspberry Pi 3 does not work very well with bluetooth. This was all our team member’s first time working with the Raspberry Pi board, which caused quite a learning curve.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we created an affordable and innovative device to for the visually impaired community.

💭 What we learned

Through research, we gained a lot of knowledge about the low-vision community. It was an incredible learning experience to uncover numerous false assumptions we had all made about people who are blind or visually impaired.

👟 What's next for The Magic Glove

We want to take our device from a prototype to a final model. In our model that will hit the market, we will include brail on all our push buttons as well as vibration features for Spatial Orientation. We also aspire to include a feature for Optical Character Recognition.