What You Should Know If You See Someone With Shoes On

Austrian computer scientists have made a revolutionary shoe called InnoMake that helps blind people walk without hitting anything. The shoes, which cost more than $3,000, were made by an Austrian company called Tec-Innovation and the Graz University of Technology.

Each InnoMake shoe has a waterproof ultrasonic sensor on the toe that can pick up on obstacles up to 13 feet away. Sounds and vibrations let the wearer know when they get close to something. The technology is like the parking sensors that come in cars.

Tec-Innovation co-founder Markus Raffer, who is blind, praised its usefulness: “This works very well and is already a great help to me personally.”

Each foot has its own sensor, which can be built into the shoe or added after the fact. These sensors can even tell the difference between things like walls, cars, and stairs, giving you the right alerts.

Tec-Innovation wants to improve the design of InnoMake by adding machine learning and camera-based recognition to make it even easier to use. In the future, there may be a “street view navigation map” to help other users.

Friedrich Fraundorfer from TU Graz said, “They use camera images from the foot perspective to find an area that is free of obstacles and safe to walk on, and they can recognize and tell the difference between objects.”

People who are blind or have low vision could benefit greatly from InnoMake because it could help them move around more safely and independently.