George.ai
Visual assistant for blind pedestrians
George.ai helps blind persons to safely use crossroads.
There are more than 1.7 million visually-impaired citizens in France and 58% find it difficult to move around the city.
I grew up near Paris and I noticed that few crossroads have audio description to inform blind people when to cross. I wanted to do something about this issue.
George.ai is a mobile app (integrated in Facebook Messenger) that assist visually-impaired pedestrians in the challenge of crossing a road safely.
source : https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/2020-09/handicapvisuel.pdf
George.ai is based on a AI (powered by deepomatic) that analyse pictures of the street to recognise crosswalk lights and tell the user if it's green or red.
I really enjoyed using AI to adress the needs of a community who is often forgotten by technological progress. Starting with a specific painpoint allowed me to build something simple yet useful.
Tested around the streets of Paris, George.ai is pretty reliable but still can't reach the high safety standards that such product would require to be used without any human assistance. Basically I was facing the same challenge that autonomous cars are facing : complex environment where a bad decision can have terrible consequences.
It was still a lot of fun :)
More infos : https://georgeai.mystrikingly.com/
https://medium.com/@deschamps.alix/episode-4-george-ai-le-chien-robot-1b76031ae2cc [FR]