SolCane

Most blind people rely on a simple white cane their whole lives. The assistive technology that exists today is out of reach for most of them.

A plain cane only tells you what it touches. It cannot say who is in front of you, read a sign or tell you that your bus has arrived. We think independence should not be a luxury.

The cane feels obstacles in front, to the left and to the right, and signals them through vibrations in the handle. A camera lets it see: it recognises familiar people, reads text, describes the scene and spots the bus at the stop.

It talks in Romanian. Say “Take me to the pharmacy” and it plans the route. A separate app keeps the family close: they see the location in real time and can add destinations.

The earlier version, built at ITFest 2026 and public on GitHub, runs on an ESP32 with three ultrasonic sensors and three haptic motors, one per direction, plus a fourth motor that fires when all three sensors read under 30 cm. An ESP32-CAM streams video to a FastAPI backend that recognises faces with InsightFace, spots the bus with YOLOv8n, reads text with EasyOCR, describes the scene with GPT-4o-mini and speaks Romanian through ElevenLabs.

We are now extending it with indoor localisation and collaborative mapping: Wi-Fi positioning, sensor fusion and computer vision, so the cane can learn the layout of a building and the obstacles that keep coming back.

First place at the Consolid8 social innovation hackathon, held on 16–17 October 2026 at Cowork Timișoara and organised by consolid8 and fonduri-structurale.ro.

An earlier version won the Grand Prize at ITFest 2026 in Timișoara.