A Touch of Light

A step towards enlightenment for those living in the world of darkness.

A Young India Fellowship Initiative in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania


      





Monday, October 1, 2012

Team viSparsh receives a cash grant of 2 lac INR

We are happy to announce that we have received a grant of  Rs. 2 lakhs as one of the winners of the Economic Times- Power of Ideas 2012 contest.The contest was held in association with Department of Science and Technology and the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmedabad.  Thank you all for the support as we see our idea comes a step closer to the realization.

 

Monday, September 3, 2012

Our Business Idea reach finals of Economic Times-Power of Ideas 2012

As a next step to productize viSparsh and make it reach to the target mass at a subsidized price, Team viSparsh had made a Business Plan and applied in Economic Times- Power of Ideas Contest 2012. This contest being organized in association with Department of Science & Technology (DST) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad is India's Largest Entrepreneurship Development Programme.
We are excited as our business idea reached among top 75 ideas from all across India who would stand a chance to win seed funding. The semi-finals were held in Bangalore last month and 75 ideas have been shortlisted from among 504 semi-finalists and thousands of initial applicants.  The team has been provided an opportunity to go through an intensive 10 days mentorship workshop at IIM Ahmedabad to further refine and implement our business idea.
Thank you all who have been continuously supporting us from all around the world to start this next revolution in the field of assistive technologies.

The ET- Power of Ideas 2012 finalist list can be found at :

Thursday, August 16, 2012

viSparsh chosen among the top 12 finalists of 'The Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Awards 2012'

From among 240+ entries, The Wall Street Journal today announced the top 12 finalists of Asian Innovation Awards 2012. We are thrilled to inform you that project viSparsh has been chosen as one among those finalists. Further, this year three of the top 12 innovation entries are from India compared to none in 2011. This surely indicates that India is making way ahead in terms of innovation and gives us a proud feeling being 'Young India Fellows' :)


Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444246904577574422852969682.html?KEYWORDS=asian+innovation+awards

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Team viSparsh meets Tony Scott (CIO, Microsoft)

It was a pleasant Thursday morning for us in the city of Hyderabad, India where Tony Scott ( Chief Information Officer, Microsoft) visited on 2nd August, 2012. Team viSparsh was highly excited on being given an opportunity to demo our project to him along with MD, MSIT India- Mr. Raj Biyani.
As planned, the demo went off well and Tony highly appreciated our rigorous efforts being put in the domain of assitive technology.
The idea of the project also resonated with Microsoft's aim of helping people and businesses throughout the world to actualize their full potential.
Tony also offered to extend his support for helping us achieve our vision of making this technology reach to the people in need.
Thank you Tony and Raj for your encouragement and support.

The way forward

viSparsh is one such project which has a huge potential to change the world, to make the world a better place, comes with vast future scope and infinite feature addition capacity. Thus, right from day one of this project, we have been thinking of ways through which this project can see light of the day by delivering on aspects like usability, design etc.
We recently had a meeting with our Professor at Penn and we discussed that this is the time when we should think of giving our prototype a viable shape.
Thus, if you are a tech design company who can help us solve the aspects like decreasing form-factor, improving on power efficiency and looking at other usuability aspects, we would love to hear from you. Kindly fill the contact form given on the right side bar to connect to us.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Re- set up of the Lab in Hyderabad

First Batch of YIF Programme came to a formal closure on 19th July, 2012. On receiving job offers from Microsoft, the entire team viSparsh has now shifted to Hyderabad, India. Although, viSparsh was only a part of the 8 months long internship programme at YIF, the team now plans to take it forward in the city of Nawabs. Due to the relocation, the entire lab is still in the process of shifting and we soon hope to start our work of making technology reach to the people in need.

We also have received tremendous support from Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha (Founding Dean, ISB) who was present in the town for the YIFP Hyderabad Chapter meet.
       YIFP Hyderabad Chapter Meet in June 2012

Team viSparsh visits Accenture Innovation Labs in France

As part of the winning prize of Accenture Innovation Jockeys Contest (powered by Yahoo), Team viSparsh got an opportunity to visit Accenture Technology Labs in Sophia Antipolis, France between 1st to 3rd July, 2012. The team at France got an opportunity to learn about various next Generation technologies which can be integrated in their project to make it more robust and functional. Thank you Accenture & Yahoo!
Fig. : Team viSparsh in France

 Fig.:  Tushar (team member, viSparsh) explaining project 'viSparsh'


Team viSparsh gets Best ELM Award at YIFP Convocation


Team viSparsh won the best Experiential Learning Module at the Young India Fellowship 1st Convocation. The event was held at JNU Convention Hall, New Delhi on 19th May, 2012. The team is highly excited on receiving this appreciation. The team is further motivated to work more hard and make technologies like these reach to the people in need.

Awesome day at McKinsey Office

As part of our Coaching process at the Young India Fellowship Programme, our Coach -Mr. Abhimanyu Puri invited us to his office on 10th May 2012 in Gurgaon. There we got a pleasant surprise as we got an opportunity to meet various senior leaders at McKinsey. We got many valuable feedbacks and guidance from them both about the personal and professional life. Thanks Abhi :)

Thursday, April 26, 2012

viSparsh wins the title of 'Accenture Innovation Jockeys' (Powered by Yahoo!)



After a series of levels, Team viSparsh has finally won the title of  'Innovation Jockeys 2012' (co-sponsored by Accenture and Yahoo!). The contest started n January 2012 to search for the most innovative minds across campuses in India. viSparsh won from among 1082 entries from 500+ colleges all across India. The finale was held at the Leela Palace, Bangalore on 24th April 2012. As winners, the team has got an opportunity to visit Accenture Innovation Labs at Sophia Antipolis, France in the coming months. The team also won the 'City Category' award.
Further information can be found at the the Accenture Innovation Jockeys Site. 
Team viSparsh winning the Grand Finale of Accenture Innovation Jockeys Contest (Powered by Yahoo!). The Prize being given by Ms. Rekha M.Menon, Executive Director - Geographic Services, India and ASEAN, Accenture


Team viSparsh winning the City Category in the same event.

As part of the Final Round, the team had an insightful interaction with the Jury Members from Yahoo R&D, HP Labs, Accenture Global Team and several others.







News: http://varindia123a.blogspot.in/2012/04/innovation-jockeys-of-2012-awarded.html ,
http://mail.varindia.com/mobile/Accenture_InnovationJockeys2012.htm ,
http://news444.com/a/1067179/innovation_jockeys_of_2012_awarded

viSparsh Day @YIFP

We celebrated  'viSparsh Day' at our Programme Campus on 18th April 2012. The occasion marked our gratitude to the Young India Fellowship Programme and our co-fellows who have helped us in the entire journey of viSparsh. We shared the success by hosting some games and organizing a small party in the campus itself. We wholeheartedly want to thank all of you who have been a constant support of encouragement for team viSparsh. We are highly motivated to keep up the progress work in the future and deliver a viable product in the future. Thank You All :)

Sunday, March 25, 2012

viSparsh Intro

viSparsh Experience at TechEd2012

viSparsh Prototype 2




We have finally been able to come up with the 2nd prototype of the belt as shown in the pic. Although, the size of the belt still looks similar to the previous version, we have done some major technical upgradations in the belt. The belt has now more robust power management system with single ON-OFF button and less components. Previous post provides the list of changes in this new prototype.
After making it functionally robust, our next aim is to decrease the size of the belt.



In the next version, we are trying to make a sleek design by considering various possibilities like replacing bigger PandaBoard with small BeagleBone, removing Kinect's plastic casing to use only the required components etc.
One of our main focus at present is to build a sleek design before adding more functionalities.




viSparsh @ TechEd2012


All ready with the second prototype of the belt, we showcased viSparsh at the TechEd2012 held at Bengaluru from 21st to 23rd March 2012.
TechEd is Microsoft's annual event to showcase state of the art technologies. We were given a booth to demonstrate our prototype.
This second prototype of the belt has following upgradations
- Less Bulky due to replacement of twelve 1.2V batteries with single 3 cell LiPo Battery.
- Single switch On-Off belt
- One major component mbed removed by directly running vibration motor through PandaBoard.
- Voltage Cut-off circuit integrated to prevent battery from damaging.
- Better Haptic feedback using the new vibration motors.

It was a fantastic experience demonstrating our project in such a big platform. The project was highly appreciated by the industry experts and others who visited the event.


Better Haptic Feedback using new vibration motors

In our first prototype of the belt, we were using ROB 08449 buzzers (left side of the image) to give haptic feedback to the visually impaired people.
The vibrations produced by them were perpendicular to axes of the belt and thus got significantly reduced as we taped them inside the belt. Therefore, we needed more powerful vibration motors for our purpose.
We have replaced the current motors with Pico Vibe 9mm Vibration Motor- 25mm type (RHS of the image) as it provides vibrations both in X and Y planes.
As could be seen in the pic, they are slightly bigger in size (25mm length and 8.8mm diameter) compared to 3.4 mm length of ROB-08449 motors. However, both operate at 3V and Pico Vibe produces 13,500rpm speed compared to 12000rpm of ROB-08449 buzzers. This is a significant improvement as our output depends on the efficiency of these vibrations. Further, instead of earlier 6 motors, we now have to use only 3 motors in the belt ( one for each zone- left, centre and right).

mbed Removed

We have finally succeeded in removing one major component from the belt. The initial design of the belt had mbed in it. We were using mbed to generate PWM (Pulse width Modulation) to be sent to the actuators (vibration motors in our case). However, we eventually figured out that the same functionalities can be provided by PandaBoard without incurring that extra component cost of mbed.

PandaBoard has on-board GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins that can be used to render multiple functionalities. We configured three GPIO pins as output and created three software threads to generate variable-duty PWM. This PWM further actuates the vibration motors to guide the visually impaired in obstacle-detection.

Removal of mbed is a major breakthrough for us as we are continuously working on decreasing the size of the belt to make a sleek wearable design.

Belt with 'Single Switch ON-OFF' feature


In line with the continuous up-gradations being done in the belt, the next is making the belt start with the press of a single button. The circuit deploys DPDT (Double Pole, Double Throw) switch along with the power cut-off circuit.
It now takes away the burden of making power connections everytime one had to wear the belt.


Belt upgraded with new Power Circuit


Power issues have been bothering us for quite some time. We were earlier using 4*1.2V batteries to power PandaBoard and mbed and 8*1.2 V for Kinect. This had made the design quite bulky and was taking unnecessary space. Thus, we decided to reduce the size by replacing these cells with 2000mAh, 3 cell LiPo battery which gives 11.1V. The pic above shows the integrated LiPo batteries in the belt.
Further, we have implemented the Power Cut Off Circuit to prevent 3 cell LiPo batteries from damaging whenever voltage drops below 9V.

We have built the voltage cut off circuit using details given in RC forum
The pic shows the implemented circuit.

Monday, January 16, 2012

viSparsh: A touch of light

We are continuously fine-tuning the belt according to the feedback obtained from various blind organizations. We have been visiting National Association for Blinds(NAB), Delhi and obtained valuable feedback from Mohd. Wasim.


Mohd. Wasim is blind since his birth. He really appreciated the concept of a haptic belt that makes his hands and ear free and gives a broader perception of obstacles in the path. Here is a brief video describing the concept and working of viSparsh-

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Test Drive-2: Rigorous Testing

This is the second test drive of viSparsh belt. We prepared an obstacle course in a closed hall and and simulated a special test environment with dummies and different sort of obstacles. The obstacles were of different materials, heights and widths. The test results were quite encouraging.


There has been some significant changes from our last test drive- 
1. We have increased number of vibrators from three to six to give a better indication of obstacle to the user. 
2. An autorun script has been created and deployed which starts the viSparsh belt automatically when we switch it on.  


Here is a video snippet of this test drive-


Monday, October 1, 2012

Team viSparsh receives a cash grant of 2 lac INR

We are happy to announce that we have received a grant of  Rs. 2 lakhs as one of the winners of the Economic Times- Power of Ideas 2012 contest.The contest was held in association with Department of Science and Technology and the Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, IIM Ahmedabad.  Thank you all for the support as we see our idea comes a step closer to the realization.

 

Monday, September 3, 2012

Our Business Idea reach finals of Economic Times-Power of Ideas 2012

As a next step to productize viSparsh and make it reach to the target mass at a subsidized price, Team viSparsh had made a Business Plan and applied in Economic Times- Power of Ideas Contest 2012. This contest being organized in association with Department of Science & Technology (DST) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad is India's Largest Entrepreneurship Development Programme.
We are excited as our business idea reached among top 75 ideas from all across India who would stand a chance to win seed funding. The semi-finals were held in Bangalore last month and 75 ideas have been shortlisted from among 504 semi-finalists and thousands of initial applicants.  The team has been provided an opportunity to go through an intensive 10 days mentorship workshop at IIM Ahmedabad to further refine and implement our business idea.
Thank you all who have been continuously supporting us from all around the world to start this next revolution in the field of assistive technologies.

The ET- Power of Ideas 2012 finalist list can be found at :

Thursday, August 16, 2012

viSparsh chosen among the top 12 finalists of 'The Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Awards 2012'

From among 240+ entries, The Wall Street Journal today announced the top 12 finalists of Asian Innovation Awards 2012. We are thrilled to inform you that project viSparsh has been chosen as one among those finalists. Further, this year three of the top 12 innovation entries are from India compared to none in 2011. This surely indicates that India is making way ahead in terms of innovation and gives us a proud feeling being 'Young India Fellows' :)


Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444246904577574422852969682.html?KEYWORDS=asian+innovation+awards

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Team viSparsh meets Tony Scott (CIO, Microsoft)

It was a pleasant Thursday morning for us in the city of Hyderabad, India where Tony Scott ( Chief Information Officer, Microsoft) visited on 2nd August, 2012. Team viSparsh was highly excited on being given an opportunity to demo our project to him along with MD, MSIT India- Mr. Raj Biyani.
As planned, the demo went off well and Tony highly appreciated our rigorous efforts being put in the domain of assitive technology.
The idea of the project also resonated with Microsoft's aim of helping people and businesses throughout the world to actualize their full potential.
Tony also offered to extend his support for helping us achieve our vision of making this technology reach to the people in need.
Thank you Tony and Raj for your encouragement and support.

The way forward

viSparsh is one such project which has a huge potential to change the world, to make the world a better place, comes with vast future scope and infinite feature addition capacity. Thus, right from day one of this project, we have been thinking of ways through which this project can see light of the day by delivering on aspects like usability, design etc.
We recently had a meeting with our Professor at Penn and we discussed that this is the time when we should think of giving our prototype a viable shape.
Thus, if you are a tech design company who can help us solve the aspects like decreasing form-factor, improving on power efficiency and looking at other usuability aspects, we would love to hear from you. Kindly fill the contact form given on the right side bar to connect to us.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Re- set up of the Lab in Hyderabad

First Batch of YIF Programme came to a formal closure on 19th July, 2012. On receiving job offers from Microsoft, the entire team viSparsh has now shifted to Hyderabad, India. Although, viSparsh was only a part of the 8 months long internship programme at YIF, the team now plans to take it forward in the city of Nawabs. Due to the relocation, the entire lab is still in the process of shifting and we soon hope to start our work of making technology reach to the people in need.

We also have received tremendous support from Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha (Founding Dean, ISB) who was present in the town for the YIFP Hyderabad Chapter meet.
       YIFP Hyderabad Chapter Meet in June 2012

Team viSparsh visits Accenture Innovation Labs in France

As part of the winning prize of Accenture Innovation Jockeys Contest (powered by Yahoo), Team viSparsh got an opportunity to visit Accenture Technology Labs in Sophia Antipolis, France between 1st to 3rd July, 2012. The team at France got an opportunity to learn about various next Generation technologies which can be integrated in their project to make it more robust and functional. Thank you Accenture & Yahoo!
Fig. : Team viSparsh in France

 Fig.:  Tushar (team member, viSparsh) explaining project 'viSparsh'


Team viSparsh gets Best ELM Award at YIFP Convocation


Team viSparsh won the best Experiential Learning Module at the Young India Fellowship 1st Convocation. The event was held at JNU Convention Hall, New Delhi on 19th May, 2012. The team is highly excited on receiving this appreciation. The team is further motivated to work more hard and make technologies like these reach to the people in need.

Awesome day at McKinsey Office

As part of our Coaching process at the Young India Fellowship Programme, our Coach -Mr. Abhimanyu Puri invited us to his office on 10th May 2012 in Gurgaon. There we got a pleasant surprise as we got an opportunity to meet various senior leaders at McKinsey. We got many valuable feedbacks and guidance from them both about the personal and professional life. Thanks Abhi :)

Thursday, April 26, 2012

viSparsh wins the title of 'Accenture Innovation Jockeys' (Powered by Yahoo!)



After a series of levels, Team viSparsh has finally won the title of  'Innovation Jockeys 2012' (co-sponsored by Accenture and Yahoo!). The contest started n January 2012 to search for the most innovative minds across campuses in India. viSparsh won from among 1082 entries from 500+ colleges all across India. The finale was held at the Leela Palace, Bangalore on 24th April 2012. As winners, the team has got an opportunity to visit Accenture Innovation Labs at Sophia Antipolis, France in the coming months. The team also won the 'City Category' award.
Further information can be found at the the Accenture Innovation Jockeys Site. 
Team viSparsh winning the Grand Finale of Accenture Innovation Jockeys Contest (Powered by Yahoo!). The Prize being given by Ms. Rekha M.Menon, Executive Director - Geographic Services, India and ASEAN, Accenture


Team viSparsh winning the City Category in the same event.

As part of the Final Round, the team had an insightful interaction with the Jury Members from Yahoo R&D, HP Labs, Accenture Global Team and several others.







News: http://varindia123a.blogspot.in/2012/04/innovation-jockeys-of-2012-awarded.html ,
http://mail.varindia.com/mobile/Accenture_InnovationJockeys2012.htm ,
http://news444.com/a/1067179/innovation_jockeys_of_2012_awarded

viSparsh Day @YIFP

We celebrated  'viSparsh Day' at our Programme Campus on 18th April 2012. The occasion marked our gratitude to the Young India Fellowship Programme and our co-fellows who have helped us in the entire journey of viSparsh. We shared the success by hosting some games and organizing a small party in the campus itself. We wholeheartedly want to thank all of you who have been a constant support of encouragement for team viSparsh. We are highly motivated to keep up the progress work in the future and deliver a viable product in the future. Thank You All :)

Sunday, March 25, 2012

viSparsh Intro

viSparsh Experience at TechEd2012

viSparsh Prototype 2




We have finally been able to come up with the 2nd prototype of the belt as shown in the pic. Although, the size of the belt still looks similar to the previous version, we have done some major technical upgradations in the belt. The belt has now more robust power management system with single ON-OFF button and less components. Previous post provides the list of changes in this new prototype.
After making it functionally robust, our next aim is to decrease the size of the belt.



In the next version, we are trying to make a sleek design by considering various possibilities like replacing bigger PandaBoard with small BeagleBone, removing Kinect's plastic casing to use only the required components etc.
One of our main focus at present is to build a sleek design before adding more functionalities.




viSparsh @ TechEd2012


All ready with the second prototype of the belt, we showcased viSparsh at the TechEd2012 held at Bengaluru from 21st to 23rd March 2012.
TechEd is Microsoft's annual event to showcase state of the art technologies. We were given a booth to demonstrate our prototype.
This second prototype of the belt has following upgradations
- Less Bulky due to replacement of twelve 1.2V batteries with single 3 cell LiPo Battery.
- Single switch On-Off belt
- One major component mbed removed by directly running vibration motor through PandaBoard.
- Voltage Cut-off circuit integrated to prevent battery from damaging.
- Better Haptic feedback using the new vibration motors.

It was a fantastic experience demonstrating our project in such a big platform. The project was highly appreciated by the industry experts and others who visited the event.


Better Haptic Feedback using new vibration motors

In our first prototype of the belt, we were using ROB 08449 buzzers (left side of the image) to give haptic feedback to the visually impaired people.
The vibrations produced by them were perpendicular to axes of the belt and thus got significantly reduced as we taped them inside the belt. Therefore, we needed more powerful vibration motors for our purpose.
We have replaced the current motors with Pico Vibe 9mm Vibration Motor- 25mm type (RHS of the image) as it provides vibrations both in X and Y planes.
As could be seen in the pic, they are slightly bigger in size (25mm length and 8.8mm diameter) compared to 3.4 mm length of ROB-08449 motors. However, both operate at 3V and Pico Vibe produces 13,500rpm speed compared to 12000rpm of ROB-08449 buzzers. This is a significant improvement as our output depends on the efficiency of these vibrations. Further, instead of earlier 6 motors, we now have to use only 3 motors in the belt ( one for each zone- left, centre and right).

mbed Removed

We have finally succeeded in removing one major component from the belt. The initial design of the belt had mbed in it. We were using mbed to generate PWM (Pulse width Modulation) to be sent to the actuators (vibration motors in our case). However, we eventually figured out that the same functionalities can be provided by PandaBoard without incurring that extra component cost of mbed.

PandaBoard has on-board GPIO (General Purpose Input Output) pins that can be used to render multiple functionalities. We configured three GPIO pins as output and created three software threads to generate variable-duty PWM. This PWM further actuates the vibration motors to guide the visually impaired in obstacle-detection.

Removal of mbed is a major breakthrough for us as we are continuously working on decreasing the size of the belt to make a sleek wearable design.

Belt with 'Single Switch ON-OFF' feature


In line with the continuous up-gradations being done in the belt, the next is making the belt start with the press of a single button. The circuit deploys DPDT (Double Pole, Double Throw) switch along with the power cut-off circuit.
It now takes away the burden of making power connections everytime one had to wear the belt.


Belt upgraded with new Power Circuit


Power issues have been bothering us for quite some time. We were earlier using 4*1.2V batteries to power PandaBoard and mbed and 8*1.2 V for Kinect. This had made the design quite bulky and was taking unnecessary space. Thus, we decided to reduce the size by replacing these cells with 2000mAh, 3 cell LiPo battery which gives 11.1V. The pic above shows the integrated LiPo batteries in the belt.
Further, we have implemented the Power Cut Off Circuit to prevent 3 cell LiPo batteries from damaging whenever voltage drops below 9V.

We have built the voltage cut off circuit using details given in RC forum
The pic shows the implemented circuit.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Monday, January 16, 2012

viSparsh: A touch of light

We are continuously fine-tuning the belt according to the feedback obtained from various blind organizations. We have been visiting National Association for Blinds(NAB), Delhi and obtained valuable feedback from Mohd. Wasim.


Mohd. Wasim is blind since his birth. He really appreciated the concept of a haptic belt that makes his hands and ear free and gives a broader perception of obstacles in the path. Here is a brief video describing the concept and working of viSparsh-

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Test Drive-2: Rigorous Testing

This is the second test drive of viSparsh belt. We prepared an obstacle course in a closed hall and and simulated a special test environment with dummies and different sort of obstacles. The obstacles were of different materials, heights and widths. The test results were quite encouraging.


There has been some significant changes from our last test drive- 
1. We have increased number of vibrators from three to six to give a better indication of obstacle to the user. 
2. An autorun script has been created and deployed which starts the viSparsh belt automatically when we switch it on.  


Here is a video snippet of this test drive-