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.
This idea of building a mobility tool for blind & visually impaired people came when I met a blind person doing a FaceTime to a friend to get help moving around back in 2020.
bring self-driving cars features to a small harness that can detect incoming obstacles
Our team at biped builds all-in-one mobility tools. Our first product is called NOA. 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. The device can also give GPS instructions & describe surroundings using AI. Hence the name: Navigation, Obstacle, AI (NOA).
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?
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...
Over 350 people were involved in beta-testing biped
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.
This is what we came up with:
Why it looks like this?
We took this device to semi-industrial stage. It's now assembled by batches of 50 units in Switzerland with our partners.
We had testers, prototypes, software, a team, we raised 2.5M$, now let's build it! It took us 28 months after I joined full time to launch our device on the market. Here's the launch video:
Since then, we've opened 17 countries with over 25 distributors & helps users walk thousands of kilometers independently.