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Said Mohaddes Sadeqi · the proof

At seventeen, our team of three built a wearable that let a blind person hear and feel a room instead of seeing it.

Shipped 2022 Herat, Afghanistan · Samsun, Turkey

Glasses with an ultrasonic sensor and audio feedback, shoes that vibrated, and a GPS module. About $112 in total. Field-tested with blind users at a support centre in Herat, then taken to TEKNOFEST Black Sea, where it won Best Presentation.

The problem

In Herat, if you were blind, you got around with a cane or with someone else's arm. Both only tell you what is already in front of you. Nothing we could find used sound and touch together, to tell a person what was coming before the cane found it. We wanted a system that did not put the whole job on one sense, because a cane alone means every obstacle is a surprise until the last second.

The constraint

I was seventeen, team captain of three students at Herat Boys' High School. Our team was called ABRT01. We had $112 in total, no lab, and a TEKNOFEST deadline that did not move for any of that.

The decision

We built three things instead of one: glasses with an ultrasonic sensor and audio feedback, shoes that vibrated, and a GPS module. You got the same information through sound and through your feet, rather than from a single channel doing all the work.

That is three separate parts to build, wire, and keep working on $112, instead of one polished object, and three parts means more that can fail when your whole team is three people. A single device would have been simpler to demo and harder to break. We gave that up on purpose. We also brought the finished kit to a support centre for the blind in Herat and tested it there before the competition, rather than after.

The Third Eye Kit laid out from above: a pair of trainers fitted with sensor housings at the toes, beside the glasses rig with its ultrasonic sensor and wired electronics. Photographed in 2022 and tinted amber.
The kit, 2022. Shoes and glasses.
The GPS module on a wooden table: a small circuit board with its antenna wired to a flat metal patch. Photographed in 2022 and tinted amber.
The GPS module.

What broke

Wear the glasses and you are tethered to a battery pack by a wire. It is three separate things you put on your body, not one integrated device.

We ran the field test once, in that room, with that person. We do not know what the kit does after a month of someone wearing it every day, because we never got the chance to find out. It was a prototype and it behaved like one: it worked in the room we tested it in, and we cannot say more than that.

The outcome

We went to TEKNOFEST Black Sea, in Samsun, in September 2022, and won Best Presentation. Anadolu Agency and Faktor.ba both covered it on their own, and TEKNOFEST's own finalist registry lists our team, ABRT01. It is the one claim on this page nobody has to take my word for.

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