Pretty solid arguments. I had an idea once for an addition to a cane specifically for blind people trying to learn or use echolocation. This would be a periodic noisemaker built into the cane so the blind person wouldn't have to chirp themselves.<p>I guess there's no reason why this would have to be in a cane as opposed to a little device you could store in our pocket or on your belt. When I was imagining it I thought the cane would be a good spot to put a battery plus device, but seeing so much emphasis on weight from this article - maybe not.
I had the fortune of working for a very small company that made electronic vision enhancers and portable readers for visually impaired people. We were just 2 developers and there were about 15 people in total mostly doing electronics, assembly and marketing.<p>It was very surprising how dumb our intuitions can be about what's important for our customers and what isn't. And how easy it is in daily grind to make something that can't actually be used by a blind or elderly person. I think they would be better of if they hired at least one blind developer, even if (s)he worked a little slower.
As someone who’s lost most of my proprioceptic sense of balance[0], I use a cane for two things. The main one is as replacement sense of balance; having the cane resting even very lightly on the ground fills in some gaps left by my feet and gives me a feel for my orientation. The cane is also helpful in minimizing risk from falls. That’s where I think there’s room for some improvements. If my had a way of detecting either that I was tipping over, or (easier), that I’ve hit the ground very hard with the tip, and were able to deploy some additional stabilization, that would be really helpful.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception</a>
Not visually impaired but I have used canes for several stretches over the past few years while healing from athletic injuries. For that use case the one innovation was the collapsible cane which was handy for public transport, planes, and driving (only time I appreciated,nor used, automatic transmission). I always felt like a “tourist” using a cane.<p>I do use hiking poles and though my camping preference is to buy as absolutely little specialized gear as possible, I was glad when I switched from ski poles to adjustable hiking poles.<p>It’s all about the domain, as this article so nicely points out.
While we're at it, can we stop replacing physical knobs and buttons by dumb touch sensitive buttons ? I feel like a cave man when I have to repeatedly press "+" on my induction hob and hear the stupid beep it makes x times. Plus it does not work well when it's wet which of course happens a lot, it's a kitchen ffs. A good example of "backwards" progress unless of course the ease of cleaning your hob is more important to you than using it for you know, cooking.
I don't know why but my brain kept inserting an R into cane. It took a while for my brain to unsee the R.<p>I am all for equality and enablement but I was downright terrified of crane operators with visual impairments. The imagery of such an operator on a dock unloading container ships will haunt me.
I've just realized that there are probably raging internet debates about what kind of cane tips are best. I'm not sure why I think I'm surprised by this realization.<p>As for "smart canes", I always figured it'd be more useful to have a fixed single-point LIDAR on a rigid head mount with some fast, imprecise output device like an eccentric buzzer motor with logarithmic amplitude for distance. Point head, get rough distance, just enough to get a general impression of how far away a wall is or where there's an opening. Apparently this isn't what people are talking about when they complain about worse-than-useless smart canes, though? It seems really obvious that speech synthesis might be the worst possible output system for something like this.<p>/ramble