A sophisticated electric walking cane for the blind is ready for mass production by this summer, the National Science Council (NSC) said yesterday, stressing the need for increased development and training for open source software (OSS) technologies.
The cane uses five supersonic sensors and advanced OSS that can drastically improve quality of life for the visually impaired, the council said.
“Though this is not the first electric cane on the market, it is the most sophisticated,” said developer Wang Wen-fong (王文楓), a National Yunlin University of Science and Technology computer science and information engineering professor.
PHOTO: LIN CHIA-CHI, TAIPEI TIMES
Wang said that guide dogs are difficult and expensive to train and hoped the invention could be a viable alternative.
“The cane’s supersonic sensors can detect road conditions up to 4m ahead of the user, distinguish between a dry road and one with puddles and even sense whether a tree branch is low enough to hit the user’s head,” he said.
The cane is part of the NSC’s OSS and embedded OSS development program, said Kuo Yau-hwang (郭耀煌), a National Cheng-kung University computer science and information engineering professor and leader of the program.
“Though Taiwan’s information and communication technology industry is a world leader in terms of hardware development, a gap exists in OSS development,” Kuo said.
As such, the NSC plans to allocate NT$100 million (US$3 million) in grants to sponsor tertiary institutional research projects for OSS training and development, he said.
OSS, as opposed to closed-source software, is software whose source code is open or at least partially open to the public, meaning users are free to use, modify or redistribute it without having to ask for permission.
“The popularity of Linux-based personal notebooks [such as Asus’ Eee PC] and cellphones — which use OSS, unlike Microsoft’s Windows — has in recent years allowed the development of OSS to blossom,” Kuo said.
As OSS is becoming the future of software, Kuo said that the country urgently needs to invest in it, adding that he felt the engine to drive domestic OSS development was the nation’s university students.
“In the past year, the NSC sponsored 99 OSS research teams in schools. Together, we have developed about 50 OSS programs, involving 407 doctorate and masters students,” he said.
Progress has also been made on the walking cane and other projects such as WiMax research, Kuo said.
“We plan to develop more OSS in intelligent terminals, broadband communications, telematics and multiple-core systems, so that our hardware has an increased competitive edge in the global market,” he said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS