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Some Thoughts on Smart Canes
- pplante 6y agoI don't know why but my brain kept inserting an R into cane. It took a while for my brain to unsee the R. I am all for equality and enablement but I was downright terrified of crane operators with visual impairments. The imagery of such an operator on a dock unloading container ships will haunt me.
- kowlo 6y agoStrange - same here. Not sure why Smart Crane is something I couldn’t under.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoHad the same thing for a moment. Perhaps because I'm a not a native English speaker.
- gumby 6y agoModern container ports are already equipped by extensively smart cranes (although yes, they still require a skilled and highly paid operator). So it is unlikely someone would write such an article in 2021 :-)
- ALittleLight 6y agoPretty solid arguments. I had an idea once for an addition to a cane specifically for blind people trying to learn or use echolocation. This would be a periodic noisemaker built into the cane so the blind person wouldn't have to chirp themselves. I guess there's no reason why this would have to be in a cane as opposed to a little device you could store in our pocket or on your belt. When I was imagining it I thought the cane would be a good spot to put a battery plus device, but seeing so much emphasis on weight from this article - maybe not.
- lupire 6y agoDid you think of this idea before smartphones were invented?
- alanbernstein 6y agoThere are plenty of electronic devices that are still valuable as a discrete object instead of an app that requires navigating your smartphone's ui to use (obviously). The article gives one specific reason: "I've walked several miles in weather cold enough to become frost bitten in minutes, and I can't aford to take my gloves off to operate a touch screen." The article mentions GPS specifically as not an important part of a smart cane. Other features need to be easier to access, or more dependable than a phone which might die because of all the other things draining its battery.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI'm only imagining this tool, I've done no research on it. In my imagination you may need to point the sound, you may need specialized speakers to get the right frequency and duration for the click, and you might not want the clicker to be in your pocket / might not want to be holding your phone out of your pocket for long periods of time.
- cassepipe 6y agoWhile we're at it, can we stop replacing physical knobs and buttons by dumb touch sensitive buttons ? I feel like a cave man when I have to repeatedly press "+" on my induction hob and hear the stupid beep it makes x times. Plus it does not work well when it's wet which of course happens a lot, it's a kitchen ffs. A good example of "backwards" progress unless of course the ease of cleaning your hob is more important to you than using it for you know, cooking.
- kowlo 6y agoUsing my induction hob is a nightmare for this reason.
- talliedthoughts 6y agoAnother possible reason for not having physical buttons is waterproofing. There would need to be a small gap between the button and the hob surface, and water or cooking oil could get in there, causing issues with the electronics, in addition to making it harder to clean.
- elric 6y agoHow common was water damage to hobs before physical buttons were removed? I'm guessing not very. Maybe there's a bit of cost saving involved when manufactoring hobs without buttons. But I'd much rather pay a couple of extra currency units and get something that's user friendly.
- KineticLensman 6y ago> How common was water damage to hobs before physical buttons were removed? I'm guessing not very. I think this is correct - not much damage. I used gas hobs for decades with various types of buttons and knobs. With appropriate recesses, washers, etc not much spilt water got past them, but the resultant complex surfaces were difficult to clean.
- bserge 6y agoI liked hardware buttons hidden beneath a polymer layer (to simulate the look of touch buttons). Easy to use, clean and waterproof. The downside was that the plastic layer sometimes came off after a few years on cheap appliances and needed re-gluing. Better than a failed touch panel, though.
- saulrh 6y agoI've just realized that there are probably raging internet debates about what kind of cane tips are best. I'm not sure why I think I'm surprised by this realization. As for "smart canes", I always figured it'd be more useful to have a fixed single-point LIDAR on a rigid head mount with some fast, imprecise output device like an eccentric buzzer motor with logarithmic amplitude for distance. Point head, get rough distance, just enough to get a general impression of how far away a wall is or where there's an opening. Apparently this isn't what people are talking about when they complain about worse-than-useless smart canes, though? It seems really obvious that speech synthesis might be the worst possible output system for something like this. /ramble
- tpmx 6y ago"lidar for the blind" -> https://www.fastcompany.com/90574130/this-startup-wants-to-replace-the-white-cane-for-blind-people https://www.fastcompany.com/90574130/this-startup-wants-to-r... Some people call it a https://twitter.com/hashtag/DisabilityDongle https://twitter.com/hashtag/DisabilityDongle though.
- adamcstephens 6y agoYeah I was thinking chest would be more ergonomic.
- saulrh 6y agoI can see why people don't like that one, yeah. It obviously can't replace the cane; you're always going to need at least one tool available that's as infallible as having a chunk of rigid stuff actually run into an obstacle or fall off an edge. It wouldn't even be useful in addition to a cane due to the awful ergonomics and interface.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Udik 6y agoWhat about fingertip mounted (rings, basically) small ultrasonic sensors? Each could be mostly independent (save for battery, I guess) and exploring the space would be as easy as slightly waving and tilting the hand. Tactile feedback would go straight to the fingertip. Quick to wear and remove.
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- dukeofdoom 6y agoA cane that doubles as a monopod for a camera would be cool. Something that can switch from a single tip to a tri tip tripod.
- grayclhn 6y ago... for blind people???
- dukeofdoom 6y agoNon blind people used to carry a cane around. I think more of a multitool in a cane format for regular people.
- grayclhn 6y agoRight, but TFA wasn’t about those canes.
- gumby 6y agoFor the monopod case this is easy to find with hiking poles (a camera mount in the grip). The tripod case is unlikely to be popular for reasons described in the article: it would add weight for a mostly uncommon use case, add something that could break (think about how you use hiking poles: I’ve bent quite a few, always in the lower segment) which would then make it deadweight you’d be dragging around for many days until you got out of the wilderness.
- ajuc 6y agoI had the fortune of working for a very small company that made electronic vision enhancers and portable readers for visually impaired people. We were just 2 developers and there were about 15 people in total mostly doing electronics, assembly and marketing. It was very surprising how dumb our intuitions can be about what's important for our customers and what isn't. And how easy it is in daily grind to make something that can't actually be used by a blind or elderly person. I think they would be better of if they hired at least one blind developer, even if (s)he worked a little slower.
- JshWright 6y agoWhy would you assume they would work slower?
- ajuc 6y agoI don't know if they would. I said it would be worth it even if they did.
- ThrowawayP 6y ago> "Why would you assume they would work slower?" I'm legally blind and I work slower, in some regards, particularly when working with text produced by other people. Most of the colleagues I knew who are legally blind also had similar limitations. The other poster's assumption is not unjustified.
- bashinator 6y agoAs someone who’s lost most of my proprioceptic sense of balance[0], I use a cane for two things. The main one is as replacement sense of balance; having the cane resting even very lightly on the ground fills in some gaps left by my feet and gives me a feel for my orientation. The cane is also helpful in minimizing risk from falls. That’s where I think there’s room for some improvements. If my had a way of detecting either that I was tipping over, or (easier), that I’ve hit the ground very hard with the tip, and were able to deploy some additional stabilization, that would be really helpful. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
- saulrh 6y agoI've seen some studies saying that hats with gyroscopes are effective, but they focused almost entirely on an exotic output device that worked via sensory substitution. What am I missing about "hat with gyroscopes and tiny servos that tap you on the side of the head in the direction that's down"? I assume that's the first thing that everyone would try but I haven't heard about it being a common medical device, so there must be something wrong with it. Or is it the "deploy some additional stabilization" step that's missing? Can't think of a realistic way to do that, true. Anything solid enough and deployed quickly enough to be useful would be dangerous. Can't just beef up the cane, you'd have already tried that if it was useful.
- bashinator 6y agoCould be as simple as spring-loaded extra feet that lock into place.
- gumby 6y agoNot visually impaired but I have used canes for several stretches over the past few years while healing from athletic injuries. For that use case the one innovation was the collapsible cane which was handy for public transport, planes, and driving (only time I appreciated,nor used, automatic transmission). I always felt like a “tourist” using a cane. I do use hiking poles and though my camping preference is to buy as absolutely little specialized gear as possible, I was glad when I switched from ski poles to adjustable hiking poles. It’s all about the domain, as this article so nicely points out.