| Germans unleash electronic guide dog
| By Jan Libbenga. The Register
|
| Published Tuesday 6th April 2004 11:48 GMT
|
| German company Papermeier has introduced an electronic "guide dog" for the
| blind called Trekker which uses GPS to navigate.
|
| Trekker is a PDA with a route map and GPS receiver which calls out its
| current location: "You are at 6
| Leopold-Ahrends-Strasse", for example.
|
| The company stresses that the PDA is not a replacement or a substitute for
a
| cane or a guide dog. With its 10m accuracy it
| won't be able to avoid major obstacles, for instance. What's more, current
| GPS route maps can't offer such detail.
|
| Neither is the Trekker the first such aid for the visually impaired.
| Recently, an invention called VoiceNote GPS attracted a
| lot of publicity. This device comes with 5GB hard drive and costs around
| $2000.
|
| The Trekker, however, runs on a regular GPS-enabled Compaq IPAQ and comes
| with a 64MB flash card. The company's website (in
| German only) doesn't yet mention a price. ®
|
| http://www.papenmeier.de/reha/products/trekker/trekker.htm
|
|
|
|
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