World Sight Day is October 13th.
OrCam Technologies, which has been around since 2010, is continually coming up with new innovations
As we approach World Sight Day, one Israeli company is ensuring it continues to deliver groundbreaking solutions for the visually impaired.
OrCam Technologies, whose Vice President of Research & Development, Nir Sancho, is a Technion alum, has recently launched OrCam Learn – an interactive assistive solution that empowers students with learning challenges, such as dyslexia.
The handheld assistive device is compact and wireless with an intuitive point-and-click operation that reads out loud any text that has been captured by a student. It will then listen to and provide feedback on the student’s reading comprehension, using a variety of metrics such as text difficulty level, fluency, accuracy, reading rate and total reading time.
It works across a range of formats, including books, screens or paper handouts.
Its technology supports both teachers and schools and results in enhanced comprehension, reading fluency and improvement of overall confidence in an education setting.
There are currently over 50 schools in the UK currently using OrCam Learn.
The innovation is just the latest in a long line for the award-winning company. At the beginning of the year, it won a CES innovation award for its MyEye Pro device, which aids the blind and visually impaired by reading out printed and digital text, as well as recognising people and helping to identify products.
The MyEye Pro is mounted onto a pair of glasses to communicate visual information. Its new ‘Smart Reading’ feature, which helps users find specific information – much like the Ctrl-F (Find) functions on a computer – helped sway the judges, along with its voice assistant, which “enables control of all device features and settings hands-free, using voice commands.”
Meanwhile, OrCam Read – the handheld digital reader – won Best Consumer Edge AI End Product at the 2022 Edge AI and Vision Product of the Year Awards.
Launched in 2020, it supports people with mild to moderate vision loss, as well as those with difficulty reading, using a ‘point and click’ function that allows the device to read text from print or screens.
It was featured in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2021