Blind Clock

Blind Clock

Challenge: My wife is an Occupational Therapist, she comes across all types of people with unique challenges.  Quite frequently she creates innovative solutions to help improve her patients’ lives, and every once in a while I’m lucky enough to help.  For this project my wife’s patient was an elderly woman living in an assisted living community.  She had recently become blind and experienced many challenges that one could imagine, however something that we might easily take for granted was really upsetting her patient – she didn’t know what time it was when she woke up, it could be the middle of the night or it could be any time in the morning.  For blind people many clocks already exist and generally exist in two categories – Braille and Speaking.  Braille was ruled out quickly, this patient had no interest in the lengthy learning process required.  A Speaking Clock would have been a good option, however the patient shared a room with a roommate and was quite concerned that she would wake her roommate up by checking the clock.

Solution: Create a Clock that could provide tactile feedback for telling time.

The grid of 12 blocks on the left is one block per hour, the four blocks on the right are 15 minute segments (now that I think about it, we only needed 3 for that, oh prototypes!)… top left is the AM/PM toggle block.

Clock logic is performed by an Arduino Uno board interfacing with a PC via serial over USB to get the actual time. The PC dependency will be removed by adding an RTC circuit.

The Arduino controls servos which moves the blocks in and out.