Research project selected as finalist for Innovation Radar Prize
The European research project Sound of Vision which aims to facilitate blind and visually impaired people to sense their environment, has been nominated for the Innovation Radar Prize 2018. The project is led by research scientists at the University of Iceland. The general public is invited to vote for the best project on-line until 12 November.
The project, Sound of Vision, has been ongoing for three years and was awarded close to €4 million from Horizon 2020; the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme, in 2015. The project manager is Rúnar Unnþórsson, professor at the University of Iceland's Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. His partners are Árni Kristjánsson, professor at the Faculty of Psychology, a group of postdoctoral fellows, doctoral students, and research scientists within the University, Icelandic National Institute For The Blind, Visually Impaired and Deafblind (NIB), as well as engineers from universities and institutes in four other European countries, Romania, Italy, Poland, and Hungary.
The group has developed state of the art technologies to develop a wearable system allowing the visually impaired to perceive the environment and move independently, in indoor and outdoor areas, without predefined sensors. The equipment that has been developed includes a sensory belt that is placed around the user's waist perceiving information from the environment, and the user receives this information via audio models inspired by natural phenomena like liquid sounds and image-like haptic projections. The sensory belt can, furthermore, prove useful to those who are temporarily deprived of their usual senses. This may apply to employees in various situations such as smoke diving or surveillance in great noise. The Sound of Vision project was also second runner up in the University of Iceland's innovation prize last year:
This equipment has been developed in close collaboration with blind and visually impaired people in Iceland and the plan is to launch a start-up company based on this idea next year in order to get the device into general use. It is possible to see how the equipment works in a video produced by the research team.
It is estimated that around 300 million people in the world have some kind of visual impairment according to the World Health Organization, of whom around 40 million are blind. A project like this could therefore improve quality of life for an extremely large group of people.
Vote for the best innovation project
Sound of Vision has been nominated for the European Commission Innovation Radar Prize 2018. The competition was launched to identify Europe's top innovators and their innovations. Using the radar, 50 of the best EU-funded innovators have been identified to compete with their EU-funded work. Thousands of projects were considered for the competition of which the evaluation committee nominated 50 finalists in five categories. Sound of Vision is one of 10 projects chosen in the category "Tech for Society 2018;" a category that aims to recognise new technologies impacting society and citizens, developed in EU-funded research and innovation projects.
The general public then decides which project is the best in each category via electronic voting until 12 November. The election takes place on the European Commission's website.
Four projects in each category will be chosen on the basis of the public vote. The 20 finalists get to pitch their plans for going to market to a jury composed of a panel of investors and entrepreneurs in Vienna in Austria in December. Their task is to award the Innovation Radar prize for the most impressive pitch in each of the 5 categories and consequently the winner of the 2018 Innovation Radar "Grand Prix" Prize.
"It is a great pleasure to be nominated and it will benefit future work on the project. It facilitates reaching out to potential investors in order to market the product and gain support from companies. It is a tremendous honour for the University of Iceland and a recognition of the results of three years of intensive work. Being selected as a finalist will furthermore help us in grant applications for research and development funding," says Rúnar Unnþórsson, project manager for the Sound of Vision and professor at the University of Iceland's Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.
