The 23-year-old who broke into the 100 global thinkers list of 2019 alongside Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Stephen Hawking is none other than Indian Scientist Roopam Sharma.
Roopam is best known for his work on Manovue - the world’s first intelligent wearable visual assistant that combines vision intelligence and internet of things in the form of an inexpensive wearable. It eliminates the need for the 200-year-old braille language, allowing the visually impaired read printed text (non-braille) in real time improving their literacy, employability and overall wellbeing. During his interaction with visually challenged individuals at a blind school in Delhi, Roopam grasped their challenges with Braille and its considerable shortcomings in the 21st century, like difficulty in language learning, unavailability and the high cost of braille books. He found that there exists more than 85% un-employability rate only because 95% of the community doesn’t have braille literacy. India, which hosts around 75 million visually impaired people, less than 1% of the community has braille literacy. Thus was born the concept to replace braille and make vision transcendent through “Manovue”. Developed by Eyeluminati, a technology company based in Washington DC led by Roopam Sharma and Neeraj Saini, Manovue is the intelligent personal assisting system for the visually impaired and does three main things:- It enables the user to read printed text by simply pointing over the text.
- It helps them to navigate freely outside well known environment through haptic feedback.
- It comes with a completely voice controlled mobile phone application and enables the user to use his phone only through his voice.
