If Matei Gardea has his way, navigating sidewalks in residential neighbourhoods will soon become a lot safer for visually impaired people.

Gardea, a high school junior at the University of Toronto Schools, is preparing to launch a mobile app this June that he says will greatly improve the way blind people move around the city. The app is called Blind Pilot and will be initially free to download for anyone using iPhone 8 or Google Pixel 2 or newer models.

“The idea came after I witnessed a pedestrian looking down into her phone collide with a visually impaired person,” said Gardea, who interns as an artificial intelligence researcher at the University Health Network and has a background in computer programming.

“I wanted to see if anybody thought of using a smartphone for blind navigation, but I could only find beacon/GPS-based apps, which don’t detect obstacles.”

The app will function using the rear camera of the phone to capture what is in front of the person who is walking. In real time, the app uses a built-in offline high-speed AI model to identify the safe areas ahead. Then the phone vibrates in the direction that is safe and clear of any obstacles, indicating where it’s safe for the person using the app to walk.

Gardea says the app will be revolutionary for the people in the visually-impaired community, who will no longer face the fear of striking unseen objects and obstacles while walking. The app, he says, could be a better option than relying on “a cumbersome white cane” or a guide dog.

To emphasize the potential for this new platform, Gardea uses an idea once preached by Apple founder Steve Jobs when he said the iPhone is a powerful tool because it will do something tomorrow that it can’t do today.

“I think that is a good way of looking at this app,” said Gardea, who is now in Grade 11. “It can be updated to work in any environment, used for other forms of mobility like finding an empty seat on a train or navigating a grocery store. A smartphone-based navigation tool is only limited by what the community can imagine.”

Gardea and his team are now working with a prototype, conducting extensive tests to ensure its safety for users. Their plans for in-person testing have been hindered by the ongoing physical distancing measures to combat the spread of COVID-19, but people can sign up on the website (https://www.blindpilot.org/) to get notifications on the progress.

There’s also a plan to seek partnerships with groups such as the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) for the app to reach more people.

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