Wearable Computers Applied to Blind Navigation

The evolution of wearable computers will greatly benefit all people with disabilities. Wearable computing is an emerging industry using prototypes and concepts worked out years ago by Dr. Steve Mann. Dr. Mann did his initial research in Canada in the 1970's on his own, then continued his work at McMaster University in the 1980s. His work became better known when he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Dr. Mann carries on his work as the director of the Personal Imaging and Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto where his focus is on personal vision systems. Dr. Mann has extensive literature on the internet. After reading this page, Dr. Mann offered the following comments:

"i see mention of my wearcam work on that site. you might want to add a link to the wearcam www page, or perhaps to the original research papers associated with this work, e.g. there's a good list of papers at http://wearcam.org/wearpubs.html"

also, in particular, related to blind vision, is my "blind vision" project of the 1980s (no funding for it, though) as well as some more recent work http://hi.eecg.toronto.edu/procieee.htm and two papers http://wearcomp.org/vmp.htm; http://weartel.com/mr.htm on mediated reality and the visual memory prosthetic (VMP)"

my wearcam, wearcomp, smart clothes, etc., www sites are now at toronto (used to have wearcam, etc, running out of mit when i was there, but since moved to toronto, e.g. in case you might have been wondering what happened to some of the www servers i used to have such as 18.85.100.44, etc.)."

steve

Dr. Mann designs his own wearable systems and also experiments with wearable computers from companies. One of the earliest and most popular wearable computing companies is Xybernaut.

Other companies in the wearable computing field include the Mentis wearable from Teltronics; the Urban Jungle Pack from the company of the same name, and a company from Switzerland called GeoAstor.