The Blackstone Charitable Foundation today announced that four students out of nearly 1,150 applicants were selected as winners of the inaugural Blackstone LaunchPad Ideas Competition, each receiving a $10,000 cash prize. Scott Harris, a UCSF Neuroscience PhD Candidate, submitted his "Quale" technology to the competition.
Quale is a noninvasive visual prosthetic that allows visually impaired people to navigate the world through a device that continuously snaps pictures and then transforms the images into audio signals, creating a continuous audio feed that functions as a user’s “eyes” by informing them about every aspect of the visual world they encounter.