the experience of the idb's innovation lab

Students learned geometric & mathematical concepts and this helped ther orientation & mobility skills fewer students per teacher, hands-on techniques can be applied, with more time per student with the teacher. How can a teacher have the time to provide a blind student the attention he/she requires when a large classroom comprises mostly children who can see?

Law in Colombia mandates inclusion: all students with disabilities have the right to attend the school of their choice. However, there are no particular directives or additional resources for integration and, thus, there is a great need for tools that can help the inclusion process of these children.

At the Universidad de Pereira, Colombia, a pair of young entrepreneurs, María Fernanda Zúñiga Zabala and John Guerra Gómez, have founded DUTO S.A., a company that researches, develops and markets technology products for visually impaired students. These products enable the perception of color and images with touch.

IRIS is a device that has two main components: software with a database of educational images and hardware that generates a set of vibrations that can be felt by touching the surface with your hands, enabling one to feel the creation of shapes and the representation of colors through pulsations. The child, for example, will place his/her hands on the device, and the teacher can instruct the device to produce a circle, an image included in the software.

The child can then feel the circle being drawn on the device’s surface. In addition, each color has been assigned a speed of vibration, so that children can ‘read’ the color with their fingers. If the circle is red, the student will know by the speed of the pulsations related to that color.