Tech your life in your hands

Market watch
Barrier Break Technologies, a Mumbai-based company, has a range of assistive products for people with hearing, vision, mobility and learning impairment. Take a few to start with. They have a hearing aid compatible, Braille support, large key phone from GE, meant for people with hearing and visual impairment. There is a vibrating alert, large keys with Braille script and direct buttons for emergency numbers. This comes at around Rs1,500. A screen reader for visually-impaired, along with a magnifier, is priced at about Rs9,750.

Then there is an adaptive keyboard, four times bigger than normal ones, designed for people with low vision and learning disabilities. The vowels, consonants, numbers and function keys come in different colours and are in slightly altered positions to aid easy use. There is a virtual keyboard too, for people with impaired mobility, that allows them to point and click for any of the Windows applications. There is a literacy software for people with learning disabilities, Braille displayers and translators for the vision-impaired and augmentative and assistive communication (AAC) devices as well (which cost upwards of Rs6,000). As Shilpi Kapoor, the founder director of Barrier Break points out, “though we try to keep the prices as low as possible, the high customs duties on some products push up the prices of imported devices.”

Chennai-based Invention Labs Engineering Products Private Limited, too has a portable AAC device called AVAZ, priced at around Rs30,000. This product is meant for children with cerebral palsy and aims to help them communicate with their parents, friends, teachers and care-givers. It is wheel-chair mountable and supports audio-prompts for the visually-impaired.

Low-cost solutions
While technology drives the invention and modification of assistive devices, in a country like India, it is crucial to talk about cost-effective technology. Until and unless we can provide an environment of accessibility for all, these technologies remain showcase inventions at best. There are two aspects to lowering costs. One would involve creative use of existing technologies and the other would be indigenous production.

Barrier Break’s Signntalk portal is an example of the former. Signntalk.org is a web portal that acts as a kind of a call centre for hearing-impaired people. There are some products available for the vision-impaired. But we also need to think about other disabilities. “At Signntalk, we provide a sign language interpreter and translator. All a person needs is a computer with a webcam and an Internet connection. Our personnel are trained in sign language and can deliver a message conveyed to them,” says Kapoor. It is a very effective platform for connectivity for the hearing-impaired and the service is available for corporates with hearing-impaired employees too.

Worth Trust, a Vellore-based organisation is doing stellar work in manufacturing and selling low cost assistive devices. They provide residential and day-care training facilities for the disabled and have six manufacturing units, which cater to commercial needs and each of them works on assistive products for persons with disability. These are supplied to the Indian market at cost price or at heavily subsidised prices so that it is accessible to all.

For instance, its plastics unit makes Braille slates with stylus and supplies it to the Indian market at Rs70 a piece. Their mobility-aid unit manufactures and supplies manual and motorised wheelchairs, the former comes to Rs4,500 and above while the latter costs upwards of Rs27,000. They also assemble the components of the Perkins Brailler (a Braille typewriter devised by the Perkins School in Boston, where Hellen Keller studied). While these cost about 700 dollars abroad, Worth supplies it to the Indian clientele at Rs13,500. The subsidy is borne by the Hilton Foundation and Worth Trust. They also collaborate with Christian Medical College, Vellore to design low cost artificial limbs. With fitment and training, the cost for these comes to around Rs 20,000, as opposed to Rs3 or 4 lakh that one would spend on a normal motorised version.

Incidentally, Spice Telecom in India has a Braille mobile phone priced at about Rs800.

Research in motion
There is a growing body of research in India to explore this sector deeper. Barrier Break is researching on devices for persons with disability and their thrust is on hearing, learning and mobility-impairment as well. “We are trying to use cloud computing to develop tools for people with learning disability,” says Kapoor.

Worth Trust too has an active research wing and one of their ongoing projects is with an MIT researcher to develop a Braille labeler for any public notice. This hand-held device traces Braille into the signs and thereby enables vision-impaired people to read them. This is being manufactured by a team of blind
people.

Then there are city-based innovators who are pushing to provide solutions. In his twenties, Rahul Gonsalves is one such innovator who’s working on accessibility for electronic interfaces like ATMs and so on.

There’s Paul D’Souza, working on the Refreshable Braille Display, which is a device meant for people who are completely blind. This device produces paperless Braille, “it’s an equivalemnt of a computer monitor and accommodates about five lines of text”, says D’Souza. His aim is to provide it at a cost of around 500 dollars. Most of such equipment, which support a single line of text, cost around 3,000 dollars.