Be My Eyes
Technology

The app that gives new eyes to the blind

1 November Nov 2015 1949 01 November 2015
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Be My Eyes is a non-profit app that uses video calls to connects blind users who need help with sighted users. The project has been selected to participate in Singularity University's accelerator program, which takes place at NASA's Research Centre in California.

Be My Eyes is a non-profit app that connects blind and vision impaired people to normal sighted users who “lend their eyes”, as the slogan of the app says, in order to help unsighted people in their every day tasks.
As a matter of fact “even the smallest home tasks can become a very big challenge to blind people.”
http://www.bemyeyes.org
The app is currently available on the iPhone with plans to develop it for Android and it works as follows: if you are an unsighted person who needs some help, you can register to the app and connect with your iPhone through a video call to one of the registered volunteers, who is available at that moment. The video call is transferred to the display of the volunteer, who can answer the requests of the blind person in real time.
This last can ask information as if the both of them were in the same place. Like checking the expiry date of an item of food, asking for directions in the streets, choosing a product from a supermarket shelf or finding something that was lost somewhere at home.

Be My Eyes is available in 36 languages, and has also caught the attention of Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey

Launched in Denmark in January 2014 by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish inventor who is visually-impaired himself, the app was first presented at a Startup Weekend in Aarhus, Denmark's second-largest city, back in 2012, where it won the prize for most innovative idea.

Be My Eyes already has more than 300.000 users in more than 140 countries.
It has been selected to participate in Singularity University's accelerator program, which takes place at NASA's Research Center in California.