Making the world collision-free

What if your daily walk to work became a challenge? What if you had a constant fear of being hit by an obstacle or to fall? This is what millions of people live with: blind and visually impaired people, elderly people, people who suffer from hearing loss, from a spatial neglect, or pretty much anyone who doesn't feel completely aware and comfortable walking in a city center.

Using cameras & AI to solve this

biped brings self-driving cars features to a small harness that can detect incoming obstacles.

biped is an all-in-one mobility aid. It's a smart harness, worn on shoulders, that uses computer vision  to help avoid obstacles. The cameras can detect surrounding obstacles, track them, predict potential collision risks, and generate a sound feedback whenever the person is at risk of being hit by an obstacle.

The sound feedback is played in headphones, like a parking assist of a car: "beep, beep, beep", getting faster as the obstacle comes closer.

Starting with blind & visually impaired people

Why?

The market of assistive devices for blind and visually impaired people is hard. It's regulated (medical device), niche, traditional social media won't work... So why the hell did we start with this?

• We want it to be solved: biped started out of a random encounter with a blind person in Lausanne. It's still crazy that self-driving cars can detect fast incoming obstacles, and that blind and visually impaired are using a simple white cane. We can do better, and that's a sufficient reason to start.
• It's so hard the rest will seem easy: That's a deeper belief that I have. If we can scale on this market, niche, hardware, medtech, and still make it a successful case, we'll most likely be ready for scaling to new markets.
• It attracts the right people: Building a team that sticks around for the long run has no value. And focusing on problems people want to solve is a great way to achieve that.

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Involving end-users

When we started prototyping in summer 2020, we had lots of hopes and ambition, software skills, and that's mostly it. We didn't know precisely the end-users, beyond the common knowledge on the accessibility challenges of blind and visually impaired people. So we involved end-users, low vision professionals, hospitals, associations, national federations...

To date, over 350 people were involved in beta-testing biped

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Building hardware

Now onto the next challenge, none of use had a single clue how to develop hardware. We had to find the right people to work with. We partnered with VF Ingénierie which really allowed us to develop our hardware faster, and cheaper. We literally had to create something that had never been done. There is no track-record of a camera-based obstacle avoidance device that you wear on your shoulders.

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This is what we came up with:

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Demo

This is a video that I really like. We showcased it for the very first time at CES 2023 in Las Vegas. It shows one of our previous prototypes, live, in the streets in Lausanne. Ali, Saliou and Pierre are 3 of our regular testers. In this video, you can see them avoid obstacles and anticipate collisions with simple sound feedback in headphones.

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Building a vision

After a couple of months of commercialization and over 6 countries served already, we're now working on what the future of biped will be. I can't tell too much for now, but we have an unmatched ambition in our field...

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Interested?

If you'd like to: invest / distribute / help promote / put us in contact with someone you know, just send me an email: mael@biped.ai

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Oh, and here's everywhere we've shipped a biped device for now :)