Onencan makes devices to ease read for the visually impaired

While at Naalya Secondary School, Douglas Onencan started Mother Naalya Outreach Foundation. It was a foundation that allowed students to interact with communities for  exposure. In the first community outreach, Onencan and other students visited Kikaaya Village in Bweyogerere, a Kampala suburb. 

He interacted with a girl who did not have hands but used her legs to write. The sight of the visually impaired glued in one place and others with different disabilities touched Onencan. He wished he could help the disabled. 

Passion
When he joined ISBAT University in 2021 to study Computer Science in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) department, one of the assignments was to make a problem-solving project. It was not a new challenge. In 2018, while president of the Science Club at Naalya Secondary School, Onencan designed a self-sufficient electric car concept that did not require recharging. Earlier in 2016, in Senior Three at Busoga College Mwiri, he researched about hydrogen as fuel of the future with the aim of making it available to meet fuel needs, including homes. The school supported the research up to the testing stage. He failed at making parts needed to make the system safe for use because of limited resources.

“Artificial intelligence is a vast and open field that requires creativity. After acquiring knowledge about computer vision, object recognition, path planning and finding, all using the camera, depth finding, text to speech and speech to text, voice synthesis and natural language processing, there was much I could have done but I remembered the community of the visually impaired at Kikaaya. I got the idea of the artificial eye,” the 24-year-old explains.

Designing the artificial eye
Onencan says the first step involved knowing how the visually impaired live and gathering information on different aspects in their daily life. This was followed by developing four machine learning modules, each serving different functions. 
The second step was testing and evaluation using a computer with more capabilities  and the last step was deployment from the computer to a single board device to deploy outside the world.
The white small casing on the glass arm has a raspberry pi camera. The camera has modules which are integrated into a rectangular universal serial bus (USB) hub. Inside the hub is a USB sound card that has power systems, which is why it has one line.

“Everything in the casing is communicated to the hub the user fixes on their belt. The sound output is in the headset which the visually impaired wears like earphones. 
It took me eight months to develop because of financial challenges. Had I had resources, it would have taken me four months. A lot of time is spent on understanding the problem,” he says.

The eyebyorets device
Code-named eyebyorets, split into three, the device has the eye, by and orets. Orets is a company Onencan dreams to start to produce devices after school that help to read materials for the visually impaired. Eyebyorets is an artificial intelligence glass-powered device that offers functions of a human eye. It has other machine-learning modules such as object recognition, colours, size and mobility possibility to help in case the user is stuck. The artificial intelligence part comes in decision-making, depending on what the machine learning module produces. 

The book-reading module reads physical and online books.
The device is used by two categories of the disabled; the visually impaired regardless of the level of impairment, and the completely blind. It helps them have the ability to recognise what is around them and walk without a human guide. 

“During development, the biggest research goal was independence. For instance, looking after someone is full time a job. If the person being taken care of wants something, the caretaker acknowledges the need. However, some caretakers get tired, become stubborn and deny the dependant what they want even if it’s close. With this device, all that is pushed to the back and it allows the user independence to walk and see what is around them.  

AI career opportunities
Henry Semakula, a lecturer of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at ISBAT University, says when his students graduate, they have to be able to do tangible projects from which they do not only make money, but also solve common problems.
“We live in modern societies of information technology and computers. AI graduates should think deeply about making gadgets that make life easy for different categories of people. There are many society problems such as climate change that the present and future technology should solve because the world is advancing at a fast pace,” Semakula explains.

Advice to parents
Jimmy Obira, a lecturer of robotics and internet of things (IOT) at the same university, says it is important for parents to understand that the world is going through many technological evolutions, the more reason you (parent) need to support children to study technological courses. AI and machine learning are new areas that are expected to take over the world in future.

“Technological courses will help to support different work fields. In the health sector, there are few cancer specialists. You can run an artificial intelligence module or machine learning algorithm that can help doctors to diagnose patients quickly by taking images of, say, cancer cells and train a module to analyse and compare an infected person and one who is not infected. Time will come when people without a technology background will run out of jobs. The earlier you support children to study these courses, the better for their future,” Obira says.

At a glance
Born on May 1, 1999, Onencan is the fifth of Hans Tobbi Owilli and the late Sidonia Acayo of Kalongo, Agago District. He attended Dr Ambrosoli Memorial Nursery and later Dr Ambrosoli Primary School up to Primary Five in Kalongo, Pader District. In 2009, when his mother passed on, he dropped out of school for a year before joining Kalongo Primary School in 2011 for Primary Six. 

He became the school’s best in Primary Leaving Exams with aggregate eight. This earned him a placement at Busoga College Mwiri, Jinja for O-Level under the MasterCard foundation through BRAC Uganda. He then joined Naalya Secondary School, Bweyogerere for A-Level in 2018. At Naalya, he studied Physics, Economics, Mathematics and Information Technology.  

Two cents
Jimmy Obira, a lecturer of robotics and internet of things (IOT) at the same university, says it is important for parents to understand that the world is going through many technological evolutions, the more reason you (parent) need to support children to study technological courses. AI and machine learning are new areas that are expected to take over the world in future.