A man uses Biel Digital glasses at the Mobile World Congress fair in Barcelona on June 30, 2021. AFP/Josep Lago
When their two-year-old son Biel started falling over a lot and had difficulty climbing stairs after learning to walk, Jaume Puig and his wife sought medical help to figure out the problem.
After visiting several doctors, the toddler was diagnosed with low vision, a condition far more common than blindness that makes daily tasks a challenge.
In Biel’s case, it was due to an optic nerve problem but the condition can also be caused by defects in the retina, brain or other parts of the visual system, or by conditions such as glaucoma or macular degeneration.
Low vision can’t be corrected with glasses or surgery. And while magnifiers can help with specific tasks like reading, there was no available technology to help the toddler get around.
TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY
So in 2017, Puig, a Spanish electrical engineer, and his wife Constanza Lucero, a doctor, founded Biel Glasses, a company that created a digital device to help those with low vision to move about safely on their own.
“There are canes and guide dogs. Nothing else. We got into this because we saw there was a need for it,” Puig, 52, told AFP at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering.
