Roshni app

Dhruv Jain dreams of making systems and devices that enhance mobility and communication for people with disabilities. And it is not an idle dream, he is well on his way to realising it. Hearing impaired himself, 23-year old Dhruv is an IITian and a trekker, and was a competitive swimmer in his school years. Born in a family of doctors, he successfully fought against the odds to make it to the IIT. But he well knows that many others with disabilities fail to wade through myriad challenges of life. Little wonder, then, that he chose to be part of an assistive technology group in IIT Delhi after his graduation. His project is Roshni, a mobilephone-based indoor navigation system for the visually impaired. The device, funded by Korean cellphone major Samsung, is likely to hit the market in the next six months. 'Our department was frequently visited by visually impaired people. We spoke to them and found that one of the major problems they faced was difficulty in independent indoor navigation. That was the trigger that started this project,' Dhruv said. After two years of work, the navigation system, which consists of wall sensors, a waist-worn device to receive and detect signals, and a user interphase in the form of a mobile application, have been installed and successfully demonstrated at Bharti, the building which houses the computer science department of IIT Delhi. The device talks to the user with the help of the mobile handset that uses variants of the Android operating s...

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