Divya Nayan: A new light to visually impaired

This year has been deemed as the most encouraging and pathbreaking for the technological innovations that came in to solve the problems of the common man. And one such innovation that has been brought

forward by the Chandigarh based Central Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIO), a constituent unit of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) is Divya Nayan.

Divya Nayan is a personal reading machine for visually impaired or illiterate people to access printed or electronic textual information in the form of speech output. It is one of the technologies designed and developed by CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh and manufactured by Central Electronics Limited, Sahibabad, UP.

The device is based on the principle of contact scanning of a printed document and converting it to speech. The person using the device can place it over the document to be read and manually scan it. The reading device uses language-dependent optical character recognition to convert the image into text and a text to speech converter further converts the text into audio. These text files once converted into audio files can be stored in the machine and can be listened back. Unlike other devices,

Divya Nayan is handheld, standalone, portable (410 gm), completely wireless and IoT enabled. It is currently available in most of the Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi, and English but work is still going on to make it further compatible with other Indian and foreign languages. It is equipped with user interfaces such as an internal speaker, rechargeable battery, USB, headphones, SD card, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Divya Nayan comes with an inbuilt rechargeable battery which can last up to three hours. It can also be connected to a monitor and used as a mini-computer with screen reader utility. The device uses open-source hardware and software and it can even analyse a multicolumn document and provide a seamless reading. It is capable of page, text, and word level navigation while reading.

Divya Nayan was launched by DG, CSIR. CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh and is currently in the process of receiving registrations. From visually impaired individuals to institutions, bookings are being made through online mode. A trial for the device was done at the Institute for the Blind based in Chandigarh. The feedback received from various tests has been incorporated into the device to make it more user-friendly.

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) wings of various companies are funding for the development of the device. The process of distributing the device to 269 blind institutes across the country, without any cost is going on. The target price for the device remains below Rs 10,000, but it is expected to come down once the commercial manufacturing would increase.

Divya Nayan has the potential to become a substitute for the Braille system, the primary methodology of reading for those with a visual impairment. No such portable and multifunctional reading machine exists around the globe. Divya Nayan is giving a new ray of hope to the sightless and has great promise to light up their world.