Post on 08-Jul-2020
Digital Fabrication
Technologies in support
of the visually impaired
Projects and prototypes from the
makers communityExpo Milano 2015, October 24, 2015
Digital Fabrication
• A set of processes and technologies that is
well known to large manufacturing
industries
• The technological progress of the past 10
years have made them available also to
SMEs and even individual users
• Democratisation of fabrication: everybody
can design and make. Almost anything.
How to Make (almost) Anything
The makers community
• Aggregated around a few principles:
– Knowledge sharing
– Open source (hw and sw)
– Trial and error
– Learning by doing
• Makers gather in FabLabs where they
share the use of machines and their
experiences
MakerFaires and more
A few projects / initiatives
• FingerReader (MIT, USA)
• Looqui (Torino, Italy)
• Dot (Korea)
• The Hack Disability context (Rome, Italy)
FingerReader (MIT)
Looqui (PoliTo, Italy)
• Deaf-Blind people communicate with each other using a tactile signs
• Looqui is a 3D-printed hand that repeats the movements of a remote user,
allowing deaf-blind people to communicate even if they are
far from each other
DOT (Korea)
• Startup created by a team of 4 university
students
• Issues they wanted to solve:
• 1% of books translated into Braille
• A Braille reader costs 2000$+
• 95% of blind people do not learn
Braille for these reasons
Hack Disabilities
• A 2 day hackaton organized in Rome last
May 16th and 17th 2015
• Teams and individuals were called to
design solutions / prototypes to make some
common services more easily available for
visually impaired (Transportation, Social
Networks, Entertainment, Domotics and
IoT, Push Notifications)
The FEARR team
• Designers and developers who met at the
event
• They won the first prize with their braille
keyboard connected to a smartphone
using an Arduino board
• Presented at the MakerFaire in Rome last
weekend (October 18-20 2015)
Conclusions
• Bottom up innovation has unexpected
potential
• The makers community exploits the power
of heterogeneous competences through
collaboration and knowledge sharing
• When paired with modern financial
paradigms like crowdfunding, prototypes
can actually test (and go to) the market!
Thank you!
Edoardo Calia
Istituto Superiore Mario Boella
Torino, Italy
@edocalia
edoardo.calia@ismb.it