Visually impaired people need help identifying drugs in bottles and finding the correct dose. There鈥檚 not much room for Braille on a small bottle and pharmacies don鈥檛 have Braille printers anyway. Fitting a speech-synthesis chip to the bottle would be too expensive.
Pitney Bowes of Stamford, Connecticut, has an elegant solution (US 2003/69977): give the user a miniature speech synthesiser that can read a barcode that is printed on the packet or label. The speech synthesiser can be built into a pocket-sized wand that contains a scanner.
When the wand is swiped over the barcode it recites the contents and dose. The system could be extended to labels on supermarket products say, or the contents of a parcel.
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