24-year-old's innovation hopes to transform lives of the visually impaired

Having landed a much-sought-after job at the research lab of a leading global IT major, fresh out of college, Anirudh Sharma was working on cutting-edge product technologies. But he transformed the lives of millions of visually impaired people with opne simple invention. Bangalore's Anirudh Sharma, 24, has designed a shoe that guides the visually impaired to the direction they need to go, has been named Indian Innovator of the Year under the age of 35 by the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Technology Review in 2012.

Called ‘ Le Chal', his shoe-smartphone combination is a simple navigation aide. The shoe is embedded with hardware (an Arduino circuit board laid out in the sole region of the shoe and vibrating actuators on all sides of the sole).

This embedded electronics layer is connected via Bluetooth to a smartphone that sits comfortably in the pocket of the user. Most of the number crunching, processing and computation that makes the navigation possible happens here, on the GPS-enabled smartphone. Simple vibrations are the language the device uses to communicate instructions to the user.