Robotics and AI for Good: A New Future for the Visually Impaired | Mohammed Islam

Robotics and AI for Good:
A New Future for the Visually Impaired

Mohammed Islam
Founder & CEO, Amal Glass

Mohammed Islam Hashem is the CEO and R&D Manager of Amal Glass. Mohammed is an artificial intelligent engineer and a computer and information science graduate. Since 2009, he has developed many AI and image processing algorithms for robots and machine learning. In 2010, he developed an artificial intelligence-enabled humanoid robot that could walk and recognize the environment, avoiding obstacles. He then asked himself what was the need of developing and updating robots when there were humans in need of this technology more than robots! So he switched all his researche and development towards assistive technology for blind and visually impaired people which was the birth of Amal Glass. Today the eyeglasses the company makes can read books, recognize currency, recognize signs, recognize human faces, identify obstacles, and provide GPS services which enable blind people to be independent and integrate with the community. In addition, the application store enables users download new applications or update existing ones.

The idea started with the creation of an intelligent robot that can identify the environment and movement without collision and sensing the obstacles around it, which was the field of study and specialization of Engineer Mohammed Islam.

And then, the idea turned from spending the effort and time in the manufacture of a robot to make this robot serves humanity and harness all of its potential to be a support to the human being rather than be a luxury and after many research, we found the most needy people are those with special needs.

Work has begun to turn this robots robot since 2010 into smart glasses that serve the blind. Hence the idea of Amal smart glasses began. After much research, we found that many blind people need a personal assistant and some may be isolated from the outside world.

We have been working in Amal glasses to harness all our potential to make these glasses after Allah is the personal attendant that can provide all the needs of the person who lost the grace of sight, Allah willing, without the need for anyone and help him with his needs and fully integrate into the society.