digital fabrication technologies in support of the visually impaired edoardo calia

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