Wearable Vision Assistance Device with the Raspberry Pi Zero

Yishai Silver, who notes that he likes “to build stuff when other people don’t believe I can,” has come up with an assistive device similar to a Google Glass headset for those that have Retinitis Pigmentosa (or RP).

RP is a degenerative eye disease that limits a person’s field of vision, making it appear that you’re looking down a tube like a toilet paper roll. Silver’s build corrects this using a Raspberry Pi Zero and its camera to display an image wider than what the wearer could normally see, directly in front of a the user’s eye.

The device he came up with uses a Vufine wearable display for video, and output from the Raspberry Pi is rotated with a few setup commands to get everything in the correct orientation. A big challenge in the build was actually coming up with a suitable glasses-mounted display, but after finding the Vufine unit, all the elements were readily available for the build.

The project was meant to help his grandmother who has this condition, so figuring out a way to assist had a very personal meaning. With it, she has been able to double her field of view, as well as improve her vision clarity. It looks like a very approachable hack, and he notes that this type of display could be expanded into a full heads-up Linux computer, or could implement many other features beyond purely correcting a person’s vision.