IBM has launched a research project to develop mobile devices for disabled people or people who cannot read. This mobile device will be easier to use. Big Blue cooperate with the Indian National Institute of Design and the Japan Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology are working on this project.
The goal is to develop a single, easy to understand interface for mobile devices. Given that information in digital form is important. IBM thinks that internet usage for the group were also illiterate, blind, deaf, elderly is necessary.
IBM researchers in Tokyo and a team of Japanese Research Center will be focused to simplify mobile technology for the aging population of the island. In India is IBM Research and Design Institute to people who are not or only poorly able to read. They are using mobile devices to access important information.
“Through this joint research project, we will find out the real conditions and problems in information access faced by older people and people in the developing world today faces,” wrote a Japanese IBM representative. “We focus on mobile devices that have a tremendous potential as a tool for people. Our results will help us to offer affordable services for broad segments of the population who are still cut off from central sources of information.”
All software products to be developed by IBM Research and the universities, according to IBM as open source code will appear. Thus they would be freely usable for governments and businesses. The partnerships are part of the Open Collaborative Research program. The company is working with universities to develop new, open technologies. The Research Center of Tokyo is the first Japanese institution that participates in the program.
IBM has acquired in India already with the “Spoken Web” technology a good reputation. With “Spoken Web” to the illiterate, visually impaired and blind, to set up a telephone voice-based web sites and listen to them over the phone. As a “web address” each site gets its own phone number.