Health IT

From hackathon to exit: Penn students’ app to ID objects for visually impaired is acquired

Web-based retailer TheBlindGuide has acquired an app designed to help visually impaired users perceive their world.

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The rollercoaster ride of being an entrepreneur certainly isn’t for everybody. But for a group of University of Pennsylvania students, a hackathon, PennApps, became an avenue for developing a company to advance technology for the visually impaired and help them reduce some of the challenges of living independently.

MedCity highlighted the group that later became ThirdEye in 2014. Back then, it was a Google Glass app that would articulate what was in front of users when they said “OK Glass.”  An article from Technically Philly provided even more details of how the hackathon unfolded for the team.

The app enlists Google’s Cloud Vision API to identify and then voices a brief description of a given item. It can give verbalize the text on signs as well and even interpret and describe photos. ThirdEye was inspired by the cofounder Joe Cappadona’s grandfather, who is visually impaired.

Ecommerce retailer for the visually impaired, TheBlindGuide, acquired ThirdEye the company, according to TechCrunch. In a blog post originally written for Forbes, Rajat Bhageria, ThirdEye cofounder and CEO, noted that the group decided on TheBlindGuide because with the eCommerce retailer’s “deep understanding of the visually impaired (through their current eCommerce business) and their expertise in healthcare”, they would be in the best position to advance ThirdEye’s product, particularly beyond the U.S.

Bhageria also explained why he and his cofounders, who are still at University of Pennsylvania, decided to find an exit for their business.

“a large part of our experience with ThirdEye was figuring out how to get things that normally would have cost tens of thousands of dollars done for free by consistently asking for help and leveraging our student status.

“As time went on though we started to realize that while we might have been the right team to start this product, we perhaps weren’t the right team to scale it to all the visually impaired persons around the world. While we became very successful at building products and launching them with very few resources, since we were students we had limited time and also limited experience with the regulatory healthcare space. When a few parties approached us about taking over ThirdEye, we thought hard and decided that it would be for the best.

Several early and growth stage companies believe there are plenty of ways to serve the visually impaired population through digital health and smart glasses.  Aira.io envisioned a way to give blind and visually impaired users realtime assistance. By having a team of navigators stationed in call centers with a screen projecting the perspective of the wearer, the idea is to enable navigators to direct wearers to their destination. Lechal takes a totally different approach. Instead of smart glasses, the company uses a combination of GPS technology and haptic feedback that transmits a vibration through the insole or the shoe to direct wearers.

Lechal is part of a larger business, Ducere Technologies, founded in 2011 by University of Michigan grad Krispian Lawrence and MIT grad Anirudh Sharma in Secunderabad in India.

 

Image: Erhui1979, Getty Images 

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