The 2013 ADOC Digital Center Exchange Conference was held in the afternoon of August 15th at the Howard Plaza Hotel. Tamkang University and Chunghwa Telecom jointly announced a portable assistant for the visually-impaired and for senior citizens that provides them with services that can identify everyday objects and banknotes through cloud computing recognition technology and remote volunteer services, and can also use speech commands to query bus information, daily breaking news, and timely stock or price quotations. The app also allows a smart phone to become an electronic magnifying glass that helps elderly people or their friends with poor eyesight to improve the quality of their lives.

In the capacity of visually-impaired students, R&D engineer Jason Chang from TKU’s Center of Resources for the Blind , expressed the importance of this app, saying that in addition to helping improve the lives of the visually-impaired, the app can also be used by senior citizens. He further stated that the app has basic voice as well as built-in multi-touchpad functions together with a text-to-speech feature and a voice assistant to read out text so that users can easily listen to the contents of written material. Cloud computing recognition technology and remote volunteer services provide visually-impaired and elderly users of this app with services that can identify items used in daily life as well as paper money, use spoken queries for bus times and routes, and announce breaking news, stock market information and prices. The app also allows smart phones to enlarge written material for elderly people or their companions with failing eyesight so that they never need worry again about making out tiny text. In regard to safety issues for the elderly and the visually-impaired, the app has a function that can report safety conditions or transmit emergency request messages and phone calls. By entering the phone numbers of friends and relatives into their smart phones, by means of a simple operation seniors can leave home safely or, if in need of help, can send emergency messages as well as GPS coordinates and an address to family and friends so that assistance can be easily and quickly provided.

Executive Secretary Hung Hsi-ming of the school’s Center of Resources for the Blind stated that the app released today is the latest version of the portable assistant app for the blind and the elderly since Tamkang University and Chunghwa Telecom released the initial version in June of last year. The newest version has been expanded from the original visually-impaired users to include senior citizens, and the functions have also been substantially expanded. The feature which helped the visually-impaired to identify banknotes originally only worked for New Taiwan dollars, but now it recognizes five denominations, the NT, the Chinese renminbi, the Japanese yen, the US dollar and the euro. In addition, the voice feature can speak the denomination for the visually-impaired to hear. As for everyday items, a remote volunteer services system has been added to the latest version of the app whereby pictures of daily supplies can be transmitted to volunteers who then send the name of the product back to the app for the user to hear spoken by the voice assistant. Hung Hsi-ming said that the app can even identify difficult-to-recognize items like milk and fruit juice.

Jason Chang said that there is a high degree of similarity in the packaging of daily-use items, and that visually-impaired people often have difficulty in differentiating between these items by touch, causing no small trouble in daily life. The recognition feature of this app can therefore help them to resolve this kind of problem. The new version of the portable assistant app used with the Android system for the visually-impaired and elderly can be downloaded for free from the Accessible Global Information Network (http://www.batol.net), and before the end of the year, it can also be downloaded for free from Chunghwa Telecom’s Hami Apps or the Google Play Store.

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