Polo

Polo empowers visually impaired people in a world that is build to appeal visually – the grocery store.

Visually impaired people move around in grocery stores in very structured and known patterns. This leads to buying the same products over and over again since they know where they are located.

Polo enables visually impaired people to step out of these known structures and helps them to not only find any item in the supermarket but even discover brand new things they don’t know yet.

Polo consists of two parts. A companion smartphone application and a smart bracelet that is used to guide a person through the store to a specific product or giving them information about the products around them.

This is achieved by using audio information trough a bone conduction hearing aid to get audio information about products around them and vibrating motors in the bracelet and to transport movement- and location information.

By detecting the movement pattern of the user Polo makes sure to only give him the level of information detail he needs. Slow to normal movements lead to very detailed information down to a specific product level – combined with vibration information about the location and direction of that information – faster movements lead to a more general information level using only main categories.

This way Polo empowers not only visually impaired people to move a lot more freely in situations they wish to explore more freely.