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Disabled communities finding quality of life improvements with beacons

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Silicon Valley tech companies often brag about changing the world. We all want to think we’re here for some benevolent purpose; It’s how we bring meaning to our lives and how we sleep with ourselves at night after a restless day of staring at code, talking to computers and PCBs, building out SDKs, and debating an internal procedure or company structure on Slack. And just like you, we at Estimote are guilty of that pie-in-the-sky dream, too! We’re constantly innovating and improving hardware and software solutions for developers to build their ideas out, and help ‘build an operating system for the physical world.’ While we do focus on products that help companies improve their bottom line (Mirror beacons shipping soon!) we occasionally have the opportunity to help our customers mold the physical world into a more friendly, manageable and self-sufficient place for people with disabilities. And hey, that’s pretty dang cool!

We’re pretty wild about this type of use case; it’s a big freaking deal! We’re helping people help themselves. To be a part of this solution, to have our beacon technology improve the quality of life for a child with autism, or a person unable to see and navigate a school campus, or help patients communicate pain location… well, it’s enough to bring tears to our eyes, and inspires us to continue pushing forward. Here are just a few of the companies that have recently worked out a solution for people with mental, physical, or developmental disabilities.

Right-Hear

Have you ever wondered how a blind person navigates around a mall, a university, or any other public space? This is exactly the problem that Right-Hear is addressing. Right-Hear is an advanced accessibility solution that allows people who are blind or visually impaired to acquire better orientation in public spaces (mostly indoor). They like to think of themselves as the “ramp for the blind”… and their clients are anyone that needs help building out better access for all people, regardless of their vision or sense of direction. Imagine you are on a university campus. The Right-Hear app will guide you along with audio guides, letting you know when to turn right or left, telling you how many steps you are about to walk down, and even providing a button to call for extra help. By providing an app, with strategically placed beacons in the appropriate space, Right-Hear is giving their users a newfound sense of independence: they offer a helpful hand, but are opening up the world to explore safely, and naturally.

Better than explaining it, we can allow their promotional video to speak for itself:

We asked Right-Hear about integrating beacons into their app. Gil Elgrably, CTO of Right-Hear, answered: “This may sound surprising but starting with beacons is pretty straightforward. Once you understand the basic mechanism you can already build a location contextual app. The challenge starts when you want to optimize the technology capabilities to your own needs and use case. i.e the amount of beacons needed for the project, the best spot to hang them, the optimal configurations and of course the understanding what’s possible and what’s simply not. Our constant challenge is to keep evolving with the technology, new capabilities are available every several weeks and we are always looking to adopt them in order to build a better product.

We utilized Estimote SDK from day one for one simple reason - focus. As a growing startup, time is our most vital resource. We stay focused on improving our main value and what we do best - building the most advanced accessibility solution for people with orientation disabilities. We let others offer their “best value” and simply use their services. Fleet Management, Pre-configuration, Here&Now, and Security are just a few examples of Estimote platform features that we constantly use, and don’t have the need or time to develop and maintain ourselves.”

Right-Hear’s solution is very popular in their main hub of Israel, with over 100 venues already installed, such as: Azrieli, The Open University, Ra'anana Municipality, Weizmann Institute of Science, and many more. With over 1000 accessibility spots rolled out worldwide and containing Estimote beacons, native iOS and Android apps already up and running for free, and with a growing number of users, their vision to make the world more accessible for people with orientation challenges is closer than ever before.

SuperSpeak

The company Superplus was founded with a single mission: to improve the lives of children with special needs. Millions of children worldwide lack the ability to speak and communicate with their loved ones, either from developmental disabilities or neurological disorders. The app SuperSpeak is a communications tool allowing these children to express their emotions and needs through the use of photos and sounds from their own environment.

Understandably, it’s very frustrating for these children who often have challenges cognitively, to quickly and effortlessly find the right words and phrases to communicate what they need, when they need it. By combining the context and location awareness of Estimote beacons with their predictive AI, they are able to quickly find the words that are suitable for a child’s specific situation. For example, when a child is at home getting ready for school and goes into the kitchen for breakfast, SuperSpeak detects the beacon in the location of the kitchen, then offers the vocabulary for that environment and that specific situation. The child gets quick and easy access to the vocabulary needed to communicate what it relevant in that time and place. Now the child gets to request what they would like for breakfast, like Cheerios, apple, and orange juice.

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Superspeak uses the Estimote iOS and Android SDKs in addition to our Cloud for managing the beacons. In the future, they hope to integrate Indoor Location SDK to provide even further context from the children’s environment. Additionally, Superspeak utilizes GPS and WiFi to combine various sources of location information in order to provide the fullest context possible for the user experience. Since the SDKs and beacons are easy to integrate, the challenge was mostly in how to solve the user experience, making sure it was user friendly to implement the tech and features at home and schools.

“We had a great time testing out the solution and making use of it in our daily lives. It is important for us to really understand both the users needs and our how our own features work out in the wild. In our families, we often try to only use our app for communication so that we can empathize with our users as much as possible. You can imagine the interesting situations when the team would only speak through the app at home… eating dinner takes on a whole new dimension! And, it is quite rewarding to see that it actually works!” - Kim Daniel Arthur, Superplus

MND Communicate

Our last example does not yet fully implement Estimote beacons, although it’s near and dear to our hearts. Doug Livingstone is a retired Computer Systems Engineer that reached out to Estimote back in October of 2016. He lost his dear wife and best friend Kathy to Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in 2012, and has dedicated his time since building solutions to assist with people suffering from diseases like ALS, MND, and more. He’s founded his project out of this tragedy, called simply MiND Communicate. He’s clear in his mission: he’s not in it to make money, he’s in it to make the world a better, more friendly place. His goal is to help patients with difficulties or inabilities to speak or move, assisting with communicating more effectively through the use of technology. At his core, Doug is a curious and playful hacker who stumbled across Estimote beacons, and has kept us updated on his progress ever since!

When Doug first wrote to us, he was curious in creating an app in navigating a robotic wheelchair using our Location beacons, geofencing technology, and Indoor Location services. This project is still on his roadmap. These days however, he’s put his wheelchair project aside for a moment while he’s launched his first prototype, called simply, the BodyPointer.

The prototype application has 6 screens, and is aimed at medical professionals and caretakers to play with and provide feedback… a kind of electronic brainstorming. Five of the screens are variants of what a user might see. BodyPointer allows a user to look at a body chart on a computer or tablet, and identify problems by selecting Pain, Discomfort, Hot, Cold, Itchy, Pins & Needles, and whether the problem is low, medium or high intensity. Then, the patient can look at the specific body area on the diagram, which will drop a suitably coloured marker on that spot. Doug is currently using a Tobii Eye-Tracker 4C unit (used for computer gaming) to make this work. In the real world, the current process for this involves a nurse holding up a chart, pointing to it, and asking questions while waiting for an eye-blink response, an exercise that could take 10-30 minutes per problem. With the BodyPointer, this process can take seconds rather than minutes, helping to relieve the person of their pain that much sooner.

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In Doug’s own words: “I want to share my developments with interested parties to develop further and to cover everyone’s backside, I would provide a licence to use my IP so that there are no [legal] challenges. My only request would be the inclusion of a sentence in support documentation for whatever applications developed and distributed based on my ideas, ‘Dedicated to Mary Kathleen Klein (1951-2012), the inspiration for this product’.”

For now, Doug is working hard on his solutions, and leaving the prototypes open to the public on his website the moment they are ready to use and test. He’s involving himself with the MND and ALS communities, speaking to support groups, medical professionals, professors and researchers, and hopes by sharing his dreams and tests, he can inspire the next generation of engineers and developers to work towards building out these solutions in partnership with his own.

To be continued…

We often receive messages from customers interested in apps to assist with vision impairment, hearing impediments, asset tracking of medical equipment in hospitals… the list goes on. There can never be enough beacon-enabled tech out there to address all of the disabilities affecting our family and friends. This use case is all about tapping into humanity, and making the world a more hospitable environment, and we encourage all of our users out there to continue striving to build out these solutions. We’re here for support, guidance, questions, and of course, all of the tools you need to make this dream come to life, so that everyone may have a magical experience regardless of their physical afflictions. Keep at it, and don’t forget to reach out to us with your ideas.

Written by Jess Anderson, Content Creator @ Estimote

Want to know more about the use cases listed? Reach out!
Right-Hear
Superplus and Superspeak
MiND Communicate


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