Starhub Mobile: App for the Visually Impaired

DIGITAL UTILITY

Some thinks brand should be useful. Do you?

Indeed, lots of brands offer little services to illustrate their promises to encourage buying their product. The most famous example is Michelin; which created a book to encourage people to travel and their use their tire at the same time!

What’s new ?

A Facebook service, a phone app, a connected object … all services created thanks to digital have the same goals that the one created before the Internet. But the low cost of some of theses services enable brands to develop more and more service, for smaller targets.

THIRD EYES, AN INITIATIVE TO CROWDSOURCE VISION AND CARE FOR THE VISUALLY IMPAIRED

Starhub Mobile noticed that more than 7 million Singaporeans have a mobile, which means that if only one in a hundred spent at least 10 seconds to help others, there would be 200 hours of voluntary work each day.

This Singapore telecommunications specialist offers an application to crowdsource vision and care for them. Using a smartphone a visually impaired person can easily take a picture of anything. The image is then shared with micro-volunteers in real-time as a query. The volunteers can describe the image to the visually impaired, from wherever they are, making volunteering effortless, easy and instant. The replies are then converted from text to speech for the visually impaired. With this app, anyone, anywhere, can connect to a visually impaired person.

What is crowdsourcing ?

According to Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired Magazine, “crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers."

This application uses crowdsourcing intelligently, as participation only takes a few seconds but is of great assistance to blind users. "With MySmartEye, anyone can help the visually impaired in mere seconds anytime, anywhere. Imagine all the time spent waiting in queue at the bank, for lunch, for the bus or train--this is time that could be spent bringing happiness to others," said Chan Kin Hung, head of personal solutions at StarHub.

That’s a nice way to connect people to each other through their smartphone.

Results

- replies within the first 20 seconds is 3.7

- incorrect responses is less than 0.004%.

- “Project Third Eye demonstrates that together we can change lives. I believe it’ll open more than just eyes, it’ll open hearts.” Michael Tan, Executive Director, Society of the Visually Handicapped.