Florence Chan’s award-winning AI vision tool helps the blind navigate their world
PostMag talks to 5 women innovators at the top of their game and pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery: here we meet Florence Chan, co-founder and CEO of AI Guided
In 2019, Florence Chan was in the third year of her PhD in biomedical engineering. Her research focused on using artificial-intelligence vision to recognise the status of cells, differentiating between stem cells, cancerous and healthy ones. She was impressed with how efficient AI was in recognising their subtle differences. One day, while taking a break from the lab, she was strolling through a shopping centre when she spotted a group of visually impaired people navigating the mall with the traditional tools of the blind: canes and guide dogs. She wondered, “Could AI vision support them?”
That penny-drop moment catapulted her into action and soon she was in touch with the Hong Kong Society for the Blind and speaking to the visually impaired about what could best help them. Tools available in Europe and the United States that rely on GPS don’t work well in densely populated cities such as Hong Kong, because of interference from multiple devices.
Chan was already having a busy year. Pregnant with her first child, she spent her maternity leave preparing a business proposal for an incubation programme, pitching it to the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park. It worked, and in 2020, she co-founded AI Guided, aiming to create a device that allowed AI to be eyes for the visually impaired.
Beginning with a rough idea on paper, she and her team worked through 20 prototypes over five years. They experimented with devices that could be worn on the chest and head, or as glasses, and eventually settled on a belt.
