The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 25 million Europeans living with a visual impairment, with more than 75 percent of them projected to be unemployed. To assist this population with increased mobility independence and enhanced text reading capabilities, the Yes!Delft start-up Envision is developing its own hands-free, AI-based solution for smart glasses.
Envision, a member of the Yes!Delft high tech start-up incubator, is the brainchild of co-founders Karthik Mahadevan and Karthik Kannan: the Karthiks. As an industrial design student at Delft University of Technology, Mahadevan’s master’s thesis work was on finding ways to improve independence for the visually impaired. But it wasn’t until after that, while on holiday in India, that the inspiration struck the Karthiks and the Hague-based start-up got off the starting blocks.
While on vacation, Madadevan, a designer, and Kannan, an engineer, were invited to a children’s school for the blind to give a talk about their career choices. The topic: what it really meant to be an engineer and a designer. For the Karthiks, the answer was simple: it was all about finding solutions for problems. After the session, the founders stayed to talk to the kids about some of the problems the children would like to solve when they grew up. “The central theme we received was about independence. They wanted to be able to read books and go out independently,” recalls Kannan. “That triggered us to think about what we could do and how we could actually solve this independence problem.”
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