< Projects

Beltcompass

Mar. 2019 - June 2019

With: Soomin Kim, Eunsuh Jin, Jiho Lee

Our project started from a BeltCompass project developed in Geneva with Jose Louis, who has been our team’s mentor. The project goal is to build a system which “aims to change the navigation for the blind people forever”. The team extracts information from publicly accessible data sources for the map and innovative software and hardware connected through Bluetooth.

Since our team focuses on applying the original project to the Korean context, we worked with local resources. Fortunately, local navigation systems have enough detailed information for pedestrian pathways and traffic lights. This helped our team to focus on developing a prototype and conducting user research as attention to creating a script to extract navigation information wasn’t necessary.

As recommended by Jose and many other mentors, we contacted many blind associations to figure out the real needs and problems the seeing-impaired in Korea are facing. We have contacted 13 organizations, in which 5 responded and 3 interviews were conducted. Through the interviews, we were able to specify our target users and project problems: “The seeing-impaired cannot navigate themselves to the place they have never been before, without other’s help”. Also, we learned that as most seeing-impaired use cane to avoid obstacles, our belt solution serving a different purpose of navigation would be a supplement than substitution. Precision and accuracy of navigation data are also important points.

We then developed the beltcompass prototype using 8 vibration modules and an arduino uno board. While the previous version of the prototype was built in Geneva, this is an upgraded version with 8 and thus will have higher precision for which direction the user should head towards. It uses bluetooth connection to the app that chooses navigation for the testing purpose.

The final outcome of our project is a brochure and low-fidelity prototype. The 3-fold brochure contains a description of our project, prototype, user research, design requirements, and information about seeing-impaired to raise awareness. Photos of our prototype will also be included. The prototype is built with arduino as stated before and has total 8 vibration modules that will signal directions for navigation: front-left, front, front-right, right, right-back, back, back-left, and left.

Organized by:
SDG Geneva Summer School