Octopus Card has a variety of uses and is already a part of our daily life. It can reduce the trouble of money exchange. But the information of the octopus card is displayed by text on the monitor, have you thought of how helpless those vision-impaired people are? This must be a big problem to them.

Consequently, we designed a system, which improvised the octopus system for their use. The system will read the price/fare, the remaining balance and the record of card in Cantonese or English.

We have conducted a survey on the vision-impaired and found out what they really need and figured out three solutions.

1. Let the computer will read out the information directly.
2. Let users receive the information through headphones and radios, since the first solution may cause undesirable noise and there is the issue of privacy.
3. Let the users receive the information through telephone calls or voice message.

Lastly, if this system is further developed, it can also be used in schools. For instance, the parents can know if their children are late for school, not handing in homework or what they do after school (like shopping, taking transport etc). Some parents said they are interested in this function too. In addition, we can install a card reader on the traffic lights, while the vision-impaired people are crossing the road, they can put the card on the card reader and the system will tell them where they are.

Sound Walker, with five students' afford. They are:

F4 Chau Yau Sing
F4 Lam Ka Ho
F3 Cheng Mei Yu
F3 Lo Hung Kuk
F1 So Ying Lam

Sound Walker won seven awards during 2004-2006, including local and internation awards.

Sound Walker
1st-Runner up at Hong Kong Students Scinece Competition
Prizes at Shanghai International Youth Science and Technology Expo
Champion at IT in Communications Contest 2005
Honourable Mention in My Favourite Inventions for Quality Living Competition 2005
Hong Kong Adolescents Science Technology Contest - The Third Award
2nd Runner ups in Hong Kong Youth Technology Design Competition
Silver Award in Hong Kong ICT Awards 2006

Interview with Media

Students' invention posted on Technofrontier, RTHK
Sound Walker receiving interview with TVB
Receiving Interview with RTHK Radio 2