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'Seeingeyephone' help Visually Impaired Read Products by Innovisions
Topaz, a Type 1 NFC (near field communication) tag designed and developed by British firm, Innovision Research & Technology, featured in the ‘Most Innovative NFC Proposal of the Year 2007’ – at the first European NFC Competition held last month as part of the NFC Developers Summit at the Wireless Information Multimedia Applications (WIMA) 2007 event in Monaco.
Topaz, mandated last year by the NFC Forum as the Type 1 NFC tag, proved to be a popular choice at the NFC Competition and was the tag of choice for the ‘Seeingeyephone’, an innovative use of NFC by the Technical Research Center of Finland, VTT.
The project is aimed at visually impaired customers who are unable to read product information in shops. The Topaz tag containing an ID and address with product-specific data, such as the price, use-by date and nutritional values, is simply attached to the shelf next to each product. When the customer holds an NFC-enabled phone up to the tag, the text-based information is retrieved and the phone’s text-to-speech synthesiser feeds the information directly to the user in their chosen language.
Innovision’s Topaz tag, popular among NFC developers for its memory size, low-cost capabilities and flexibility across a wide range of NFC applications, was used by many of the NFC Competition’s 21 finalists, including France’s MIS MDBS for its HOTELNOVA and the Institute of Electronic Business from the University of Arts in Berlin for its Mobile Sales Assistant (MSA) for retailers application.