Wrist Scanner is a Futuristic Personal Shopper For the Blind

Although visually impaired people have been managing to get along just fine for centuries without a lot of high-tech gadgets, there are still some things that could make their lives easier. The See is a concept from Dinard José de Mata Filho that is meant to make shopping simple, even for people who aren’t able to see what they are shopping for.

The gadget involves two elements: a wrist-mounted barcode scanner and a pair of ear buds. When shopping, the user swipes the scanner over bar codes on products. The internal machinery then translates the coded info into speech and tells the shopper what the product is and, if applicable, the size and color.

There are several questionable parts of this concept, such as how a blind person would find a bar code to begin with and how all of that technology will fit into such a small, thin wrist band. But if those issues could be ignored, the See is actually a smart tool that could stand to help countless visually impaired people get exactly what they go into the store to find.

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See more in Unbuilt Concepts or under Technology. February, 2012.