Harvard smartphone app guides the blind faster, with fewer collisions

If you have standard human vision (even if assisted by glasses), chances are you’re adept at finding things, people, and paths to them. But if you have impaired vision, or none at all, countless tasks that are simple for fully sighted people become difficult, dangerous, or even impossible. Fortunately, plenty of new high-tech tools offer assistance, including robot guide dogs, a cane-bot (looking a bit like a small R2D2 with giant wheels), multiple types of smart glasses with descriptive audio, and even a haptic vest for blind dogs.

Adding to such technological advances is Mobilio, a Harvard-University-developed AI smartphone app employing sensors and customized beeps that offers real-time navigation towards desired locations while steering users away from obstacles and dangers.

In their Nature Biomedical Engineeringpaper, PhD student Raymond Liu and assistant professor of bioengineering Patrick Slade explain how 14 test subjects using the Mobilio app with...

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