KIT Sustainable Innovation Challenge 2022 - Winner

The idea to support blind people by means of glasses developed for this purpose wins the KIT Sustainable Innovation Challenge 2022 hosted by ARRTI and receives a six-month funding.

The prize for the second KIT Sustainable Innovation Challenge goes to the team of Batcam and their idea to develop glasses that warn of obstacles, as well as recognize objects and much more. The idea is to create a platform that will support blind people in their daily life's. The prize, funded by ARRTI, includes a 6-month sponsorship for the Challenge winners. This support is intended in particular to kick-start the team's further development and thus contribute to the realization of the business idea.

BATCAM Logo

BATCAM

  • Have you ever tried to orientate yourself with closed eyes? It’s quite a challenging task, especially if you are not familiar with your environment. Millions of visually impaired people must face this challenge day to day. Their most important tool is the blind cane. However, many obstacles like branches or side mirrors cannot be detected by the blind cane and potentially harm them.

     

    We want to solve this problem with the BATCAM!
Our Innovation

The Batcam is a pair of glasses that warns the user about obstacles above the ground. When wearing the Batcam, the user receives directional feedback about the environment via smooth vibrations. Like this they know where exactly the obstacles are and efficiently avoid them.

Together with the blind cane, they form the perfect combination to navigate safely.

Our Story

Behind the Batcam there are Jeanne, Robin, Philip and Michael, who joined together the Student Innovation Lab (SIL) 2021/22 at KIT. Sharing our motivation to develop a meaningful computer vision tool that supports the health system, we have interviewed dozens of people from that field.
After careful evaluations and great interest from the blind people community, the idea of the Batcam was born.

With the help of the blind people community, the valuable lessons from our tutors at SIL, and great team spirit, we were able to win both the Student Innovation Lab 2021/22 and the KIT Sustainable Innovation Challenge 2022.

Our pitch at the SIL Final event 2022 is available here.

We have already built our first prototype, did a test event and received constructive feedback. With that we are keen to work on the next prototype. At the mean time we expand our network and participate in further competitions, such as the ASAP BW challenge.

If you are interested and want to be part of our story, contact us.