India Gives The World It's First Smartphone

India Gives The World It's First Smartphone For The Blind

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Soon, blind people will be able to read emails and SMS, as Sumit Dagar, a graduate from the National Institute of Design (NID), has developed the world’s first smartphone for blind people, which converts all text into Braille patterns, allowing blind people to read texts, emails on the device.

Sumit dagar, the force behind this unique smartphone, says,

We have created the world’s first Braille smartphone. This product is based on an innovative ‘touch screen’ which is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into ‘touchable’ patterns.

The response during the test has been immense. It comes out as a companion more than a phone to the user. We plan to do more advanced versions of the phone in the future.

Dagar says that he was motivated to help blind people and develop such a device as “technology was only serving the mainstream and ignoring the marginalised.” Dagar is also teaming up with IIT Delhi to develop a prototype of the device, which is currently under testing at L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad.

This project is currently being funded by Rolex Awards under its Young Laureates Programme, wherein five people from all over the world are selected, once in two years and their projects are funded.

As far as the working of the device is concerned, the device uses Shape Memory Alloy technology, which is based on the concept that metals remember their original shapes, i.e. expand and contract to its original shape after use.

Here’s how the smartphone works

• The phone’s ‘screen’ has a grid of pins, which move up and down as per requirement. The grid has a Braille display, where pins come up to represent a character or letter.
• This screen will be capable of elevating and depressing the contents to form patterns in Braille.
• All other elements are like any other smartphone.

Report by : Abhinav Bhargava