Five Indiana engineering students built a 12-hour wearable that helps visually impaired users detect obstacles beyond a cane or guide dog

Students at the Rose Hulman Institute of Technology collaborated to create their 2026 design projects aimed at solving everyday problems to improve the lives of people around them. Among them was a team of five who built a 12-hour wearable that helps visually impaired users detect obstacles that their cane or guide dog cannot, as per the institute's website.Ethan Powell, Anica Cao, Jada Hunter-Hays, Anuj Suvarna and Rhiley Epperson worked with 1983 electrical engineering and mathematics alumnus John Marum to develop the device. The idea for a wearable assisted sight device came from Marum, founder of the non-profit company AuralVision based out of Oakland, California. He was inspired to create a device to help those who are visually impaired using time-of-flight sensors (a form of LiDAR) after seeing how those sensors were being used in airport bathrooms to measure the amount of paper towels left in a dispenser, and how that battery-operated technology made it so custodians did not have to continually check dispensers to know when to refill the paper towels.“I began to think about how it would be possible to use that same sensor to measure distance to objects and relate that distan...