Trinetra aims to develop cost-effective, smartphone-enabled assistive technologies to provide people with an enhanced quality of life in their daily activities. The broad objective is to harness the collective capability of diverse networked embedded devices to support location-aware and context-aware applications, including first-responder support, building navigation, retail shopping, smart transportation, etc.

The project was originally conceived to enable greater independence for the blind and the visually impaired. To date, we have researched and developed a portable barcode-based solution involving an Internet- and Bluetooth-enabled smartphone to aid grocery shopping at the Carnegie Mellon campus convenience store, Entropy.

We have also more recently extended this to assist both sighted and visually impaired commuters with their transportation and commute-planning needs, using a smart phone to convey notifications of arrivals, departures, etc. We have also developed a phone-based currency identifier for the visually impaired.

Sponsors
We gratefully acknowledge the support of

  • Pennsylvania Cyber Security Commercialization Initiative
  • Nokia
  • Berkman Faculty Award
  • Motorola
  • NUANCE

Courses
The 18-549: Embedded Systems Design capstone course at Carnegie Mellon developed various context-aware smartphone-based applications over a 15-week period. Among the projects were a kitchen tracker, a building-navigation assistant, a cardiac-monitoring unit and a home-monitoring unit. We welcome industrial participation in and mentoring of the projects.