Communications of the ACM
An App to Lead the Blind
A new smartphone app is poised to help sufferers of night blindness.
Credit: SheinChina.com
People with the debilitating disease night blindness, or nyctalopia, stand to benefit from a smartphone app designed to track the location and distance walked from home or a hotel.
Developed by researchers at the Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science, and Technology, the app will warn users when they are likely to be caught out after dark. Kamran Ahsan and colleagues have designed the app to calculate both the remaining daylight hours available and estimate how long it will take the person to reach their base before nightfall.
The app is geo-aware, knows the time of sunset around the world, and has access to online mapping software than can offer users shortcuts back to their base. Moreover, the app can locate nearby hotels, which would make it useful to travelers who find themselves too far from base to get home safely by nightfall.
From EurekAlert
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