There are many people around the
world with disabilities that prevent them from communicating efficiently with
others and using the benefits of technology to its full extent. These
disabilities may include motor neuron disease, blindness, and deafness. While
these people are unable to live a completely normal life, new advances in
technology are evolving to allow them to use computers, smart glasses and
talking hands in order to advance their ways of communication.
The article
“The tech giving people power to deal with disability” explained these
different devices and how they work to an extent. It began with the EyeGaze
Edge, which is a computer that people with motor neuron disease can use. The
device works using a technology that monitors the person’s eyes and where they
are looking. This is then used to control the computer because when the person
looks at a certain area for a specified time it will then select what they were
looking at. The next device that was mentioned is the HeadMouse Nano, which is
used by people with the ability to move their head. It works with a camera,
similar to the EyeGaze Edge, however instead of tracking eye movements it
tracks a dot on the person’s forehead.
The article
then went on to discuss the devices to help those dealing with blindness,
deafness or both. The first device mentioned was the “smart glasses” which work
for those people that are blind but still have a level of light perception. The
glasses create the images that someone with normal sight would see but instead
with light using just the outline of the objects. In order to create depth in
the images of the glasses, there is a scale where the closest images are the
brightest and then as they are farther away they get darker. Finally, the
article described how deaf or deafblind people can communicate with others
using a glove. This glove has the technology to turn pinches on different parts
of the glove into text on a computer or device and then it can also translate
text back to the hand through the glove.
While the
article had interesting information about these new technologies that are
changing how people with disabilities are able to communicate today, it did not
go into depth about how the technology was used. There were many questions that
were left unanswered about how the EyeGaze Edge is able to do things such as
type words to communicate or search for things on the web using only a camera
tracking very small movements of an eye. Another concern that I had while
reading the article was how the deafblind people are taught to use pinches on a
glove in order to communicate thoughts. While the article showed many of the
ideas behind the technologies used, I believe that it could have gone into more
detail describing how the devices worked and how many people were affected by
these inventions.
Works cited
Belton, Padraig. "The Tech Giving
People Power to Deal with Disability - BBC News." BBC News. 29 Jan.
2016. Web. 09 Feb. 2016. <http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35427933>
"Eyegaze Edge Tablet." LC Technologies, Inc. Web.
10 Feb. 2016.
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