Wearable assistive devices

00:46 S1

Hello everyone! Welcome to Talking Tech. This edition available from June the 25th, 2024. I'm Stephen Jolley, great to have you with us listening through Vision Australia Radio associated stations of RPA Australia or maybe the Community Radio Network. There is also the podcast. To catch that all you need to do is search for the two words talking tech. And then it can all come, usually on a Tuesday afternoon just after it's been produced. Another option is to ask your Siri device or smart speaker to play Vision Australia Radio talking tech podcast Vision Australia Radio talking Tech podcast.

With me, someone who can explain all this tech stuff really well. Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology, David Woodbridge. David, let's start with the product minute from the vision store of Vision Australia. It's not really high tech this one, but pretty useful.

01:41 S2

What this product is is called the Mesh Gloves. And you can buy them for both your left and your right hand. You can buy them for small, medium and large hands. What caught my attention about this? And by the way, when we say mesh gloves, we're not thinking about sort of like gauntlet type stuff that you'd wear in the medieval days. When we say mesh, it's very fine mesh the same way that steel wool feels. That's the the type of mesh that's on this glove. And they've got like an inner glove. Because you don't want sort of the scratchy surface scratching your hand. But as I said, what caught my attention was the fact that it prevents your hand getting things like cut when you're using a very sharp knife. So the trick is, normally you normally would just buy one glove to have on your non-dominant hand, because that's normally the hand that's holding something like... an apple or a banana that you're cutting up with a knife. 

So the mesh gloves on that hand, and then you've got the knife in your dominant hand and you're cutting. And the thing is that if that knife then slips onto your finger or the palm of your hand or the back of your hand because you're wearing the, quote, mesh glove, you're not going to slice or cut yourself. But the other thing that I realised, what I can do with it, which is also recommended as well, is you can use it for gardening, because when I use my pruning shears, which are quite sharp, my pruning saw, which is even sharper, I sometimes slip and I'll just sort of gradually, like almost nick the side of my fingernail, which I've done quite a few times, or I'll get my knuckle on my hand and that sort of stuff. And that's the type of stuff that this mesh glove would certainly protect against. So again, really, really, really good. And pricewise, they're $15 from the Vision store.

03:34 S1

The vision store of Vision Australia, the mesh gloves. One of the things we didn't cover when we were reviewing the Apple event at WWDC worldwide, developers conference a couple of weeks ago. TV, the TV app, which of course is related to Apple TV. Just tell us how all that fits together and what's happened with the TV app this year.

03:57 S2

Yes. So the original Apple TV itself is actually the little box that you plug in via a HDMI cable into your back of your TV. So that actually is the Apple TV. It's like plugging your, you know, your Foxtel box into your, your big TV screen, but where it gets a little bit more interesting for us, iOS and Mac and iPad users is there's also an app running on those platforms. So like you've got the Foxtel Go app that runs on Android and iOS and so on. You've also got that TV app that runs on iOS, and the reason why you can choose to do either one is that, you know, when you're out and about and you've got your iPhone or your iPad, you can watch it quite nicely on your own little screen or your big screen. But then when you're at at home, of course, you want to watch it through the the Apple TV box plugged into your, as they say in the States 80 inch screen, which is huge, to enjoy it. 

Now, what WWDC was talking about is they've done a few things. So the Apple TV box itself, so not so much. The app is compatible with projectors. And there they're the projectors that can put the whole picture up on your whole wall of your lounge room. So very, very, very big. The second one is that they're making Airplay compatible with more external type speakers, not just HomePods. And the third thing that applies to both the Apple TV box and the TV app is that the dialogue in movies and TV shows, which can be quite quiet sometimes, um, compared to what else is going on, you can actually set it so it's a lot louder, so you can quite easily hear what the actors are saying over. You know, the action background type sound. So those three things have made a huge improvement to both the Apple TV box itself and of course, the TV app itself as well.

05:56 S1

And with all the other products announced at the WWDC event, we can look forward to that later this year, maybe around sometime in spring. Correct. Let's talk about vision technology now, and this will probably need a series of conversations to cover it thoroughly. It encompasses software or applications as well as devices. Should we start talking about devices today, the wearables that are available in Australia?

06:27 S2

Indeed. And we're specifically talking about Australia, because I don't want to talk about ones that you can only get from overseas or you can use in Australia if you start doing weird and wonderful things with them. So the three main ones I want to talk about is the AR vision. The vision smart glasses and the OrCam MyEye 3. So the AR vision is literally a camera with a USB-C cable that plugs into at the moment your Android phone, your Blind shell classic two, and then hopefully in about another couple of weeks or so, your iPhone. And I've got a funny feeling it's going to be the iPhone 50 and above because it needs USB-C. The second one is the end vision glasses. Now of course, they're actually based on the Google Enterprise Google Glass. 

They're like wearing a sort of a weird pair of frames without any glass in them. And you've got a little camera on the side that, you know, points forward the same way the vision does. And then you've got, of course, different software that you can run via touch or voice. And then the third one, which is the very famous one that lots of people have heard about, is the OrCam MyEye 3. That's a dedicated little camera that magnetically attaches to the side of your glasses, and that can be put on any glasses, whether it's, you know, reading glasses or whatever else, and the new version of that which wasn't available previously, that's also on the internet or access to the internet. The same with the other two.

08:04 S1

What sort of money are we talking about for these devices? They go into thousands of dollars.

08:09 S2

They do. And these are only very rough figures. The RCS vision is probably going to be around about $1,600. Australian. The Envision glasses is probably around about $5,000. And then the my eye, the OrCam one is close to up to between 7.5 to $8000. They're not particularly cost effective in some ways, except, of course, for the vision one. But what it boils down to is, and I've got all the pages in the show notes, but it really boils down to what type of features you want out of these types of hardware technology.

08:47 S1

So let's go through some of these features. Now we'll start with the R.

08:50 S2

So the R, it's interesting because it's a wired connection to both your Android phone. And like I said later on your iPhone it's a lot faster in processing information because it's directly attached to your smartphone like all the other ones. It does instant text reading. So as soon as the camera sees some text starts reading it out to you, it'll do whole document reading. It will do face recognition. It'll also do QR code detection. And then and here's where it gets very interesting. If you then team it up with the Seeing Eye app currently on Android, then you've got all the functionality of the Seeing Eye app from Microsoft. So of course that's things like short text again, document reading, barcode reading, handwriting, light detection, color detection, all that sort of stuff that you would normally get or do get in the Seeing Eye app. 

It's just the fact that it's using the AR vision camera, not the smartphone camera. So that makes it very flexible. So I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on that. Hopefully in a month or two.

09:58 S1

The Navy Lens app also interacts with this.

10:02 S2

It does. And that's sort of like a fancy, uh, QR code that can be detected from quite a long way away. I believe it's up to about 4 or 5m, because normally with QR codes you've got to be very close. This one will guide you in or let you know what QR codes are around you for the Navy lens. So particularly for shops and public places, they're really, really useful. So I might have some news on that for the vision store later on or next year.

10:29 S1

The Envision Eye smart glasses.

10:32 S2

I won't go through the items that I've just read out for the AR vision, because it's exactly the same. But what the Envision glasses do, which is the AR vision doesn't do, is that it's also got Artificial Intelligence. So, you can get it to interrogate documents that it's read so you can say, you know, what's the price of my electricity bill? You can get it to ask general questions for AI itself. And of course, it's also got a thing called smart reading, where it will try and, you know, smartly summarise a document for you. So it's a lot more advanced than the IR vision, precisely because the fact it does use the AI, which is actually ChatGPT.

11:14 S1

Tell us about OrCam MyEye three.

11:18 S2

Again, it sort of builds upon what ARX and what Envision does. So for example, we've still got all that text reading, but we've also got, besides the AI, artificial intelligence, we've also got a few other features. One of which is, you can link it up via a browser to a basically an electronic video magnifier. So whatever the camera is looking at is going to come up in the browser, on your Mac, on your windows, or on your your other iPhone or your iPad or your Android tablet, because it's just a it's just a web browser magnification. So that's looking extremely interesting. And the other thing that I found with the OrCam itself in particular, it's very good at barcode reading. So the other ones I mentioned, QR code reading. Kiap also does barcode reading, of course, but with the Orcam it's very good on barcode identification. It's also very good on face recognition. So if you tell it to recognise a person's particular face, it works extremely well. 

So as you can tell each one of these, the AR vision, the envision and the Orcam all do slightly different things. And as I said in the beginning of our chat about this, it really depends on what you want to do. Now, the thing that concerns me, though, with all three of these is this scene detection. And I purposely didn't mention this when I was talking about them, because this is the one that I've got concerns about because all of them do scene detection. So when you walking down the street, it'll say, you know, there's a tree to our left in front of you, there's a pole, there's a red postbox coming up, there's a shop, etc., etc.. The problem with scene detection, because it's actually generated through artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's comparing what that image is, to lots of other trained images. And if the camera can't get the image nice and clear, it's going to give you the wrong information back. 

So I'll give you an example. My wife drives a red Subaru Forester now in certain conditions, because it's looking at the back of the car, it thinks it's the back of a red bus. Other times it thinks that my red bin is a fire hydrant. So I guess what I'm concerned about is if you want these things for object recognition and scene detection and be able to rely upon it, I would still say at the moment, and this includes all three of them, the answer is do not depend upon them because it's not accurate enough to be that safe.

14:02 S1

Now, one interesting area of application for these devices is for people with low vision, isn't it? Because we tend to think of them as for people who are totally blind, but if you're out there having trouble reading the signage or the packaging in the stores, etc., but you do have some vision, these devices could offer the solution.

14:21 S2

That's right. And they're also effectively hands free. So you can point the camera at whatever you want to have a look at. Or pick up something and just quote, look at the actual item and it'll tell you what it is. So from a low vision point of view, it's great.

14:36 S1

I know of people using these devices at museums and exhibitions to read signage. Hmm. Very interesting. Now, before we go, a reminder of where there are details of what we've been talking about in this and previous editions of the program. 

S2

Indeed. So as always, you can check out my blog site, which is David Woodburn, Dot Podbean pod Cbn.com .

14:56 S1

David Woodburn Podbean podbean.com. To write to the program.

15:02 S2

You can write to me at Vision Australia where I work, which is David Woodbridge, how it sounds, at Vision Australia dot org.

15:08 S1

david.woodbridge@visionaustralia.org ... This has been Talking Tech, with me has been Vision Australia's national advisor on access technology David Woodbridge. I'm Stephen Jolley - take care. We'll talk more tech next week. See you.