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- Country of residence: Palestine
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The research of the young Palestinian woman, Noura Sabra (23 years old) from the Gaza Strip, related to serving the visually blind segment, gave her the opportunity to invent a jacket equipped with electronic parts that would enable the wearer of this category to move around within the home and help them carry out their tasks with ease.
The innovation that the young Gazan woman came up with is based on three technologies that help the blind, through a sensor that measures the distance of the barrier from the blind person with high accuracy, and then he is alerted vocally to everything that gets in his way, in addition to the feature of identifying electronic devices surrounding the house, and the “GPS” feature that He was able to determine the location of the blind person via his mobile phone.
Sabra worked on completing her project in a period not exceeding four months. It was initially a project for her graduation in computer and communications engineering from Al-Azhar University in Gaza, before she decided to continue developing it in a way that would enable her to complete this jacket and sell it to the blind.
Sabra told Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed: “For a period of more than a year, she was looking for a distinctive project, before she chose the blind category, which does not find much interest in the field of innovations, which is often limited to the cane that helps them along the way, but she... "You don't guide them in a real and comprehensive way."
The young Gazan woman adds that during the period of work on completing the project, she was greatly confronted by the shortage of electronic parts needed to complete her project, due to their not being present much in the local market due to the Israeli siege imposed on the Strip for 11 years, and their high cost, which sometimes exceeds the amount of (500 Israeli shekels). For one piece, its external price does not exceed 35 US dollars (one dollar = 3.49 shekels).
Sabra explains that she will continue working in the coming period to develop this jacket more broadly and deeply in an attempt to help the blind, and by working to produce more of it and sell it to this group in a way that contributes to helping them carry out their daily tasks without the need for assistance.
She points out that the high cost of electronic parts for the jacket in the local market in the sector will contribute to the rise in the cost of one jacket, which would reach 700 US dollars, while it could decrease to about 450 US dollars if it was introduced without any obstacles.
The closure of the Rafah land crossing by the Egyptian authorities prevented the young Sabra from traveling to participate in the Stars of Science competition during the month of December, during which she wanted to present her project to the Arab public in a way that would contribute to its spread and development.
It turns out that the project will be limited during the first period to the local spread of the blind category, and it will later attempt to spread it at the Arab and international levels, and it will work to develop the vest in different and diverse shapes to suit the choices of the wearer.
Sabra aspires for her project to develop during the coming period in a way that enables it to add new languages in addition to Arabic, such as English, in a way that will also help blind foreigners acquire this jacket and rely on it while moving inside or outside their homes.
The young Palestinian woman points out that the conditions of the strict Israeli siege and the security ban prevented her from inserting a special camera to add to the jacket in a way that enables the blind person who wears it to know the things surrounding her outside the house, such as cars, roads, and public places, and the matter was limited to things inside the house.
According to Sabra, the project is of interest to many institutions supporting the visually blind, and I asked them for more details about it and its working mechanism in the hope of obtaining it from them to provide it to this group.
In the midst of the siege of Gaza, remarkable creativity by young Palestinian men and women emerged in recent years, but most of them collided with the wall of funding and the absence of external marketing, travel, and receiving expertise, but that did not stop the Palestinians from their creativity.
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