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.
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