The world of assistive technology is constantly changing, with new products, designs and ideas appearing all over the place, all the time. There’s always so much being done to tackle a variety of problems that disabled people face in day to day life, relating to mobility, visual impairment or hearing. There are things being cooked up in labs and design studios around the world which are leaps and bounds ahead of the products currently available, either in terms of technology, style or both. We’re taking a look at some of the incredible developments that we’ve learned about in the last month or so:
Powerlace are ingenious self lacing shoes from Canadian footwear designer Frederick Labbe. The Powerlace automatically tighten just by sliding them on your feet. It’s all accomplished by using the weight of the foot as a counterbalance to tighten the laces. Once you slip the foot in, you just flick a small lever on the back of the shoe to lock the laces in place; unlock them later, and the shoes easily slide off. There not tremendously stylish but you can’t go wrong with simple black trainers. The shoes were going to be (and still could be) funded via Kickstarter however, with less that forty eight hours left and $95,000 dollars raised of a very ambitious $650,000 it seems unlikely to reach that target. It’s a shame because self lacing shoes would be brilliantly useful.
More likely to become a reality, albeit quite an exclusive reality, Nike are also producing self-lacing shoes this year to. They’re a recreation of the self lacing shoes seen in Back To The Future II in which Marty McFly travelled forward to that space age era of 2015. Along with hover boards and smart glasses, the Nike self-lacing trainers were one of the movie’s most loved pieces of predicted future tech and these designs are being recreated in celebration of this anniversary of sorts. The new footwear will feature “power laces,” in which motorized rollers in the shoe’s sole sense weight and tighten the laces when someone steps into the shoes, according to Nike’s patent. Back To The Future may have been wrong about the Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor but if Nike can really make these shoes then at least they’ll have been right about something.
vOICe headsets are an astonishing new piece of technology, being developed in the Netherlands, that use sensory substitution to allow totally blind people to ‘see’. The systems means that people can wear a headset and camera containing visor, which scans the environment and translates images into whistles and bleeps users can understand. After an hour of practice testers have been able to walk down corridors avoiding objects and pick objects up off desks. Far less invasive that surgery, these headsets are hard to get your head around but the process of using technology to convert images into soundscapes has been shown to work for many blind people. There’s already a popular app version which has had over 100,000 d0wnloads.
Another piece of tech on the horizon for visually impaired people is the FingerReader, which is a wearable device that assists in reading printed text. You wear the FingerReader like a ring and scan a text line with your finger. The device then scans the text and you receive an audio feedback of the words. It is a tool both for visually impaired people that require help with accessing printed text, as well as an aid for language translation. It’s just a prototype for now but looks like an extremely cool invention.
Smaller than the size of a coffee bean, the NanoPlug will be half the size of the next smallest conventional hearing aid when it goes on sale this March. The NanoPlug is another design which relied on crowd-funding to raise money but unlike self lacing shoes it easily raised all the money needed and more. It’s so small that the designers say it’s totally invisible when in use which would be really handy for people who need hearing aids but don’t use them because they’re not discreet enough.
LifeStand the French-manufactured standing wheelchair is now available in more countries than ever. These chairs are really helpful as they operate as standard wheelchairs (either electric or manual) but also have a standing function which raises the user up to a standing position when necessary. They’re ideal for a huge range of things such as reaching shelves, higher tables at bars, vending machines etc etc etc. A really practical idea as you can see in the picture below.
There are already a couple of designers creating stylish and fashionable prosthetic legs but that doesn’t make it any less pleasing to see another example in the form of Alleles Design Studio in Canada. They design and produce patterned covers to go over existing prosthetic legs and give the wearer a way to express their personality and fit their choice of cover with the rest of their outfit. Alleles Design Studio’s aim is to do for prosthetics what a previous generation of designers did for eyeglasses in turning them into stylish and fashionable accessories rather than medical equipment. The covers are intricate and colourful but expensive (in the hundred of dollars range).
Finally, stylish prosthetics are one thing but something even more incredible is happening at South Korea’s Seoul National University, where they have come up with the idea of attaching “smart skin” to prosthetics in order to restore a sense of touch to people with artificial limbs. Admittedly there is a long way to go with researchers stating that “while progress has been made in “understanding the neural circuits underlying mechanical and thermal sensation, replicating these capabilities in artificial skin and prosthetics remains challenging” but it’s an amazing thought nonetheless. Find out more on Wired.
There are extraordinary things being done with assistive tech these days. A lot of these ideas are still concepts or research stage designs but hopefully we will see them become reality in the future. 2014 was a good year for assistive tech; hopefully 2015 can be even better!
It was wonderful to read this article. It really gives hope and comfort to those looking for much needed improvement in their daily living.
Janice