Artha France only exists to serve of a cause. An economy whose first purpose is social. It's primary objective is not lucrative. We carry a collective project whose social goal is a better insertion of visually-impaired people in today's society. Our company is interested in people before money, that is why we have a collective and democratic functionning, and favor trade and local suppliers.
Proof of concept
The first prototype allowed to validate the concept thanks to the clinical trials.
June 2018
Wearable system
The current version is miniaturized and has an improved autonomy of about 6h. It takes into account the users feedback.
July 2019
Next objectives
Global performances improvement, optimisation in order to be useful in every use case scenario.
Final product
The device will have a more accessible and modular software and a more discreet design that will be thought to ease the manufacturing process.
To start their learning process, users can train using several videogames. For instance, we set up a testing universe in Minecraft, which has three main objectives :
Training
Some learning time is required in order to get used to the usage of the device and to be able to exploit its full potential.
Validation
Integrated analytics tools in the program are able to determine improvements in users gameplay and point out areas for improvement for the device.
Potential and limitations
These games allow us to see the limits of our product, and allow blind beta-testers to imagine living with it in everyday life.
Our work is based on Paul Bach Y Rita's research. He highligted the possibility to substitute the sense of sight by the sense of touch. Here is the device he used in the 80's for his experiment.
Watch our TEDx conference in Montansier theatre in Versailles (France), about the theme "How to see with the skin?" :
Clinical trials allowed us to validate the concept and to assess the limitations of the human body regarding this "new sense".
You can see above a typical learning curve on a 20 minutes session.
The user rapidly reaches the exercise limits. Knowing that he just made a good score, his attention and therefore his results usually go down but after that he regains his concentration and reaches an even better score. This example allow us to visualize the learning speed, the variation of performances according to the attention level, and the effect of fatigue
This data is analyzed and compared with all of the users in order to have a precise model, and get more intel from one single chart.
Tanks to users feedback, the time needed to get used to the device has considerably decreased, indeed in only 20 minutes a blind new tester is able to get out of different mazes in the game Minecraft.
Rémi
du Chalard
Inès
Dailliez
Wandrille
du Chalard
Benjamin
d'Hardemare
Alain
Salmon
Francois
Outters
Smaël
Berahal
Albert
d'Anthoüard
Amaury
Buguet
Raoul
Gilard
Marie
Peray
Marc
Tintillier
Sylvie Chokron
Malika Auvray
Alain Ripart
Alexandre Coffin
