Adam Ingah
The Low Vision Magnifier was a project that I had the privilege of contributing towards during my junior year of college.
This project was a joint effort from the UAB Design Engineering Prototyping Lab, as well as the Alabama Department of Rehabilitation
Services. I'd like to thank Dr. Timothy Wick and Michael Papp for being good mentors on this project.
Essentially, the Low Vision Magnifier is a disability aid that aims to make a cheaper and open source alternative to traditional
low vision magnifiers. The one I linked
here is almost $2,000 USD, which really drove the need for something like our project.
This version I had made used very simple components. The base itself is made from an afforable foam material precisely laser cut,
the hardware is running on a raspberry pi 4, and uses a 1080p embedded camera for the feed. Because it was running out of a raspberry
pi, the perihperals and external accessories were super flexible. You could connect a wide arrange of different components like a mouse,
monitor, and even different kinds of cameras based on the user's needs.
The software was a simple script that opened the camera, zoomed in, and displayed to a monitor. There were some thoughts and attempts at
making some extended features as well. Some of these features were things like Text recognition/OCR with tesseract, text to voice, and even
some document scanning program. Ultimately, we decided to keep it simple with just the magnification.
