Digital accessibility smartphones and services for visually impaired people.
Smart Health | Solution
THE CHALLENGE
Most of the visually impaired people in the developed world use basic feature-phones and minimal telecom service, essential for their wellbeing and serving as main mean of interaction with family members and friends. Access to advanced smartphone technologies, capable of further enhancing their quality of life, is practically deprived because of interface complexities and the richness of those devices and related ecosystem.
THE SOLUTION
RAY is an all-inclusive, mobile-centered, integrated cloud service that provides an easy-to-use, and cost-saving solution – perfectly adapted for the needs of visually impaired people, and serving a market segment of about $9 billion annually. Our disruptive solution, together with a successful launch in Israel that already afforded great lifestyle improvement for close to 4000 blind people, has helped us gain a deeper insight and more valuable understanding of the market, its requirements and the opportunities it brings. The Israeli mobile carriers give RAY to any legally blind person for free, and, in turn, sell it to other people with vision impairment.
WHY FIWARE
We at Project RAY were first exposed to FIWARE technologies about two years ago. We identified a few FIWARE enablers that are essential to product localization, and implemented it in the solution we now have. The great thing about those enablers is that a little goes a long way; with only a little development work, we gain a great deal of functionality that is now an essential component of the product we have in the market.
The FIWARE enablers we use include an authentication enabler that provides us with a complete “black box” for users authentication services and validation. The main benefit for us, beside the quick time to implementation, is that a crucial and delicate aspect for end-users, identity and privacy, is managed by a reliable entity that is less vulnerable to hackers and identity theft. In addition, we use a text-to-speech enabler (T2S) that can excel in different European languages and is now an essential element in the mechanism we use to speak content out loud to our visually impaired users. The alternative T2S engine available is good for English, Spanish and other major languages but lags behind for secondary languages especially in East Europe.
Lastly, we use FIWARE hosting services as a backbone server to a number of mission critical elements that require a fast response time and predictable delay.
USE CASE
In our cooperation with Hartford, Connecticut we will work with visually impaired people and train them to use our system. An important factor in their decision is privacy – a critical issue in the US, as you know. The fact that we demonstrate to them that our users’ information and registration is stored in a reliable and secure entity, and it is NOT stored on the servers of a small startup with lesser security capabilities, is a key factor in their decision making.
BENEFITS
- Easy-to-use, and cost-saving solution – perfectly adapted for the needs of visually impaired people.
- The cost of operation is significantly lower than alternative solutions.
- World’s first cell phone for visually impaired blind.
- Uses advanced cellular mobile technologies for intuitive eye-free interface.