Student develops App to assist the blind detect currency

A final year student at the Bluecrest University College has developed an App that can help the blind detect currency in Ghana.

According to the student, Daniel David Lezu, he sees the need to help the society especially the physically challenged with the knowledge he has acquired in the university.

“Although we are moving into cashless society, physical money will still be comprehensively used for standard trades and businesses but how will the visually impaired people do money transactions smoothly”? he quizzed.

As part of the Students final year project work, Lezu came about with the currency detector App for the visually impaired to help them learn and detect all set of Ghanaian currencies.

The application uses speech-to-text methodology. It pronounces the detected currency audible to the users. The App has a feature which can be used to make a call. The visually impaired can give a command by speech by mentioning the contacts he/ she want to call. The interface of the App is very simple and it interacts with the user via audio.

This is a first ever currency detector App for the visually impaired in Ghana and it will go a long way in shaping our society by developing more inclusive projects for the physically challenged people.

Eye health problems are high among the priority health needs of the people living in Ghana.

According to a recent Blindness and Visual Impairment Study the prevalence of blindness in Ghana is 0.74% and 1.07% of the population has severe visual impairment. A large proportion of those with low vision (88.9%) and blindness (67.7%) are due to avoidable causes. The SRC started supporting eye care services in Ghana in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MOH), Ghana Health Services (GHS) and Ghana Red Cross Society (GRCS) in 1991 expanding these services to the Upper West, the Brong-Ahafo and the Northern Region. It has offered outpatient department and community outreach attendance, school screenings and surgical operations and made significant impact on the eye health of the ordinary citizen of the Northern part of Ghana, considered as one of the poorest.

The Application which is yet to be launched on Google Play Store has yielded a lot of accolades from some visually impaired people who have got the privilege to use the App in its testing period.

Daniel David Lezu, the student who developed the App wishes to add more features in the app. He lamented on the need for the App to sum up the detected currency and also detected counterfeit money. All this ideas are future scope of the project which can be possible if he gets grants and supports from the Governments and other stakeholders in the country.

Professor Edmund Akpor Mensah, the supervisor of the App, urged students to be innovative in their respective fields and think outside the box.

He said the currency detector App is just what the blind community needed.

In his view, they have been neglected for far too long and it was about time innovative minds develop contents to make their living much easier.