Three young students from the University of Oviedo have been recognized at the Santander-TalentUO Awards for developing a device that will make Braille reading systems cheaper thanks to voice recognition systems
Keylab Braille is a system that converts speech into letters presented in Braille code.
Álvaro Alonso, Daniel Cueli and Luca Rodríguez had an idea in their heads. People must be at the center of technology. If engineering is not used to solve major social problems and to help those who need it, what is the use of studying engineering?
For this reason, these three students from the University of Oviedo (UO) entered the TalentUO-Santander Awards with Keylab Braille, a project that combined these two aspects. And they didn’t win, but they took a well-deserved second place in the Ideas category, which recognizes the merit and commitment of these three young Asturians. “We have been able to unite pedagogy and electronic engineering to create a braille reading prototype that works by speech recognition by which small raised dots would be raised to form the letter in Braille”, explains Rodrguez.
THE THREE AWARDED AT SANTANDER-TALENTUO
A few days ago the awards for this program were handed out to you, which, fruit of the collaboration between Banco Santander and the UO, aims to promote innovation and entrepreneurship at all levels of the university community. In the category in which Keylab Braille was competing, the winner was a mobile application that alerts drivers to the presence of cyclists on the road so that they can take action and avoid accidents.
In Transfer, the award went to a device that improves the sensitivity of antigen tests; while in the category of Business Practice who took the cat to water was a project for the design and manufacture of a 100% electric car.
Each of the three winners received 3,000 euros in this first edition of the contest. Money that would have come in handy for the promoters of Keylab Braille to continue working on its prototype. However, the real prize for them will be just that: to see it come true and to be able to help people with visual disabilities.
Because, as Luca Rodrguez explains, the objective of his idea was “to help all people with this functional diversity and, especially, the 150 blind and deaf-blind Asturian students”. And the explanation is continued by Álvaro Alonso: “We want them to join both education and the world of work, so that they can exploit their full potential and that this functional diversity is not a problem for them”.
CHEAPER THAN CONVENTIONAL BRAILLE KEYBOARDS
The question that arises when learning how your prototype works is logical: Don’t the keyboards that are already available for blind people solve this type of problem? But Alonso’s response is no less. “In Spain, aid for the disabled is about 400 euros a month, so an ordinary braille keyboard would take a year to get“, he argues.
Your prototype is simpler, but it’s also cheaper, so it would offer a solution to many more of the people who need it. “We aspire to make learning as easy and accessible as possiblehelping and improving the autonomy of people with few resources”, adds Alonso.
As the third member of Keylab Braille, Daniel Cueli, explains, his prototype “costs around 60 euros” and not only reduces the price of conventional braille keyboards, but also their carbon footprint, one of the factors that is increasingly being considered. take into account both manufacturers and consumers. “We use materials that are fully recyclable,” explains this young man, who insists on the idea with which this text began that human problems and needs should always be at the center of technology. “Engineers are not only good for programmingbut that we can and want to help”, he defends. And how not to agree with him…