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.

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.

Using cameras & AI to solve this

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).

Low vision market

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.

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...

Over 350 people were involved in beta-testing biped

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.

This is what we came up with:

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Why it looks like this?

• Had to have wide handle
• Had to have night vision
• Had to be light to wear
• Had to be hands-free

We took this device to semi-industrial stage. It's now assembled by batches of 50 units in Switzerland with our partners.

Bringing it to life

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:

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Since then, we've opened 17 countries with over 25 distributors & helps users walk thousands of kilometers independently.

What I learned

• Grind 80h+ for 5y
• Handle shitstorms
• Build hardware
• Prototype software
• Assemble teams
• Email marketing
• GTM
• Distribution
• Raise funds
• Growth hacking
• Personal branding
• Web dev