Taken from Times of India.
KANPUR: To help visually impaired in navigating the ways, special footwears named 'Lechal' (Lechal meaning take me along in Hindi) was the centre of attraction at the Techkriti-2015, the annual technical and entrepreneurial festival of IIT-K. The GPS enabled sneakers are capable of giving directions to those who cannot see.
The shoes vibrate to give directions. The smart footwear, donning red fiery colour, can also count the number of steps taken and distance travelled. Another major highlight of the sneakers being that these can be worn by even those who can see as they use Google maps for navigation. A person with a sense of independence can move around at an unknown place or a city.
The user of Lechal footwear just requires a smartphone for connecting both the footwear and the phone. This connectivity is established via bluetooth. Further, those who are not interested in buying the entire footwear can just purchase the insoles as the technology is embedded in them. These technologically advanced shoes and insoles will not allow the users to go on a wrong direction if the information about a place to go is fed in the smartphone app. On choosing a wrong direction, the shoe/insole will vibrate as a mark of indication.
Gaurav Duggal, embedded design engineer at Ducere Technologies which has rolled out Lechal shoes told TOI that the Lechal shoes/insoles connect to the phone via bluetooth version 4.0. He said that the shoes have embedded bluetooth trans-receivers which are detachable. "We have a special app which the user has to download on the smartphone. The bluetooth trans-receiver connected to the app directs the person wearing the footwear the direction whether to take a right turn or a left", said Gaurav.
He said that the visually impaired person gets the feedback from the shoe via vibrations. Further explaining about this special footwear, Gaurav said that the footwear links to the smartphone app to direct the wearer using Google maps, sending the vibrations where to go further. He said that these footwears can be worn by anyone as they give you location because of it using Google maps for navigating.
Tejas Rode, from Lechal informed that the company is based in Hyderabad and it is the first in the world to offer such a product. Tejas said that these footwears are the brainwork of Krispian Lawrence, a passout from Micighan University in US and Anirudh Sharma, an alumnus of MIT university in US. Both
of them are engineering graduates and had founded the company
named Ducere in 2010 but this footwear were released in 2014.
Gaurav Duggal said that the first pre-order for these footwears will be given in May this year. He said that for the global market, Lechal shoes cost 150 US dollars but for the Indian market, the prices will be much lower.
Source: Times of India.
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