Past Project Spotlight: Intellistix

What challenge are you hoping to solve?

Our invention ‘Intellistix’ is aiming to help blind people commute around cities. We want to give blind people back their independence.

At least 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment world and roughly 54,000 people in Ireland are blind or vision impaired. With this comes both physical health and mental health issues. For physical health, there is an increased risk of falling. Blind people can suffer through a sense of loneliness, social isolation and feelings of worry, anxiety and fear.

How does your idea work?

The basic ‘Intellistick' comes with many features to aid visually impaired people in their everyday lives:

• The stick will have a 3D mapping sensor that will map the surrounding area and will vibrate to make the person aware of objects around them.

• The stick will also send messages through speech to the persons airpods to give them a sense of what's around them

• We also introduce an app where it can map the area and upload all the information to the system that can be used to inform other blind people

• The app will also be used to build a community of blind people where they can socialise in their own personal way, for example going for a walk.