[Steve Hoefer] shared an interesting solution for visually impaired people.

It measures the distance to things and translates that into pressure on the wrist.[…] It’s wrist mounted and senses objects from about 1 inch (2 cm) to 10 feet (3.5m).  It has generally fast response time (fractions of a second) to quickly navigate complex environments.

It’s not the first time we see Arduino used for custom solutions to navigate a room and / or enviroment, replacing the sight (above all, you’ll remember the [Bat Googles] project from USI and [Halo], the winner project of Humana competition).

“Tacit”, that’s how’s called this cool project, is the first in moving the sensitive response area of the device from the head (closed to the ears) to wrists (closed to the hands). Steve, whom its first prototype was conceived has an headband like the two projects above, moved its device to the wrist for several reasons

The headband was a great first test, and it did work, but it had two fatal flaws:

1) The most dangerous obstacles are not at head level. Furniture and most of the other things that can be tripped over and stubbed on are waist level or lower.

2) Vibrating motors stuck on your skull will drive you insane quickly.

In addition it would be a challenge to disguise it as anything but some mad-science-looking headband, and blind people do care how they look.

Tacit is wonderfully referenced and it’s realeased in CC-NC-SA

via [Grathio Labs]