ATU610 – StellarTrek by Humanware with Mathieu Paquette

Hi, my name is Mathieu, and I’m the product manager at HumanWare, and this is Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology, designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to episode 610 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on February 3rd, 2023. Today’s show we’re super excited to welcome Mathieu Paquette, Product Manager for HumanWare. He’s going to tell us all about their new device called The StellarTrek and how it can help individuals with visual impairments with navigating the world around them.

We welcome back Amy Barry from BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning. And as always listeners, if you’ve got a great idea for a show topic for someone that we should have on to interview, a question, a comment, a concern, anything at all, please reach out. You can call us on our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Shoot us a line on Twitter @INDATAProject or give us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. As always, want to thank you so much for listening. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Maybe you’re looking for some new podcast to listen to. Well make sure to check out our sister podcast, Accessibility Minute and ATFAQ, or Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. If you’re super busy and don’t have time to listen to a full podcast, be sure to check out Accessibility Minute, our one minute long podcast that gives you just a little taste of something assistive technology based so that you’re able to get your assistive technology fix without taking up the whole day. Hosted by Tracy Castillo, this show comes out weekly.

Our other show is Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, or ATFAQ. On Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, Brian Norton leads our panel of experts, including myself, Velva Smith, and our own Tracy Castillo, as we try to answer your assistive technology questions. This show does rely on you, so we’re always looking for new questions, comments, or even your answers on assistive technology questions. So remember, if you’re looking for more Assistive Technology podcasts to check out, you can check out our sister shows, Accessibility Minute and ATFAQ, wherever you get your podcast, now including Spotify and Amazon Music.

Next up on the show, please join me in welcoming back Amy Barry from BridgingApps, with an app worth mentioning.

This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called, If I Need Help. If I Need Help is a free web-based app. It’s also mobile friendly, that allows family members and caregivers to create a customized wearable QR code linked to an individual with disabilities or special needs. The goal is to keep loved ones safe by alerting community members and first responders that the person wearing the QR code is a person with special needs who needs help, and tips for giving that help.

This product is not a GPS location device or a tracker tool, but an incredibly helpful low tech tool that can be implemented by parents, caregivers, and friends of those with special healthcare needs or disabilities immediately. Individual profiles can be accessed manually from any web browser or scanned via QR codes. QR codes can be read quickly by any smartphone with a camera. For community members who don’t have a smartphone and find a person with a wearable QR code, they may enter the personalized code into the If I Need Help registry, accessing the information.

If I Need Help is a nonprofit that was started by parents of a child with autism with communication challenges. They wanted to create an easy-to-use solution for their son and others like him, who may need help if he became separated from them or wandered. For more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org.

Many of our listeners, especially those with visual impairments, will know the name HumanWare, but did you know that they have a cool new device called the StellarTrek? Well, today we are joined by Mathieu Paquette from HumanWare to tell us about HumanWare and this great new device that they have. Mathieu, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on.

I am really excited to get into talking about the technology and everything, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, for sure. My name is Mathieu. I’m actually a French Canadian, hence the small accent you might be detecting. I have been working at HumanWare for a little bit over two years now. I came on board in the company as a member of the technical support team where I was doing support on low vision products as well as the Victor products. And then around this time last year, a position opened for the product management for the Victor Reader product line as well as GPS line. So I applied, got the position, started in March of last year.

Awesome. Awesome. We are so glad to have you. But the main reason we have you on today is to talk about a really cool new offering I found out about that HumanWare is making called the StellarTrek. Can you tell us what is the StellarTrek?

Yeah, for sure. Basically the StellarTrek’s a product that we launched in August of 2022 and is the successor of our many GPS products that we’ve had in the past such as the [inaudible 00:06:38], the Breeze, and the Victor Reader Trek. The Victor Reader Trek came out about five or six years ago in 2017 and basically the team was looking at what are we going to do to bring GPS to the next level? And that’s how the StellarTrek was born. Basically the StellarTrek is still a GPS device, it is now a dedicated GPS device. So unlike the VR Trek, where you can also read books and listen to podcasts and stuff like that, it is a device that is dedicated only in the navigation. However, we’ve improved upon that by adding two cameras on the back of the device and we started using artificial intelligence.

So I think this is a great time to speak about AI. Your listeners probably heard about ChatGPT and all those fun tools that are now available online. So we have some version of artificial intelligence in the device that allows us to read text to detect addresses, like door numbers and stuff like that. So that’s how we’ve moved the traditional GPS over and above the normal GPS features that you’d see, for example, on the phone.

Oh, for sure. I know one of the biggest challenges I always hear about with GSP, especially for individuals with visual impairment, is that last 40 feet. It can get me to the building, but it can’t tell me how to get in it. It’s not always bringing me to the front door or the right place or I’m 20 feet away. So I’m guessing the cameras and the AI are to get you that last little step, is that correct?

Yeah, that’s correct. Basically, when you start your navigation, let’s say your home and you want to go to your friend’s house and your friend lives at 123 Roses Street. So you’ll put in an address into your device and it’s going to give you turn by turn guidance like it would do with any other GPS device.

The difference that you’re going to see in the navigation on the StellarTrek that you wouldn’t get, for example, if you were to be using Google Maps or Apple Maps or any kind of ways, is that you’re going to get a much more descriptive experience. When you come across a street intersection, it’s going to tell you you’re coming across an intersection. A traditional GPS will not do that because a sighted user would be seeing it on their map that they’re coming across an intersection and they would be seeing it with their eyes. But as blind users cannot, the device will tell them they’re coming across an intersection, it’s a four-way street, et cetera.

Now once you get to your destination, let’s say, as I was saying, it’s 123 Rose Street, it’s going to tell you you’ve arrived at your destination. We all know that GPS is not 100% accurate. It can be a couple of feet off. We also know that maps are not always 100% accurate. Sometimes the maps are offset by a little bit. So what you can do once you’ve reached your destination, is you can take your StellarTrek, put it in address detection mode. You’re going to get a guided series of beeps that’ll help you frame the picture properly to find a door and a number, and then it’ll guide you with faster and faster beeps as you’re getting closer, kind of like hot and cold. Then, once it sees a door properly, it’s going to take a picture and it’s going to analyze that picture, and then it’s going to tell you, “We found one door at 20 feet away at 11 o’clock, house number found 125.”

Well now, you know you’re not at your friend’s house because your friend lives at 123. So you know need to go either one door further or one door back, and then it’s take another picture and it’s going to say, “One door found at 30 feet away, house number 123.”

With all that being said, what we have to keep in mind is, this is artificial intelligence, which means it’s not perfect. It’s not going to work 100% of the time. Our success rates that we’ve seen really vary depending on light conditions, on the weather, if it’s cloudy, if it’s sunny. For example, if the address number is written on a glass window and there’s a lot of reflection, then it might be having a bit more of a hard time to pick it up. We typically see around 75 to 85% success rate. So it’s pretty good, but it’s not going to work 100%. It’s not a magic bullet.

Sure, sure. If I could ever have someone on here with a magic bullet then, well, I guess it would be my last show because this would be pretty easy, but still I will take 75% over the 0% that we were at before.

That’s it.

Mathieu, a little bit of just technical things, you mentioned it’s cloudy and stuff like that. Sometimes I do have to go travel in the rain and other things. Is this device waterproof? Because usually I might be able to keep it hidden, but I know with those cameras I might need it out. Is it waterproof and able to handle the weather and everything else out there?

It’s not waterproof in the sense that if you drop it in the pool it would survive, but it is weatherproof, so you can use it in light rain or even a good pour and it’ll be fine.

Excellent, excellent. I know things change, they move roads, they close, they do that kind of thing. Does this device connect to Wi-Fi and get its information that way, or how does it update the information so that it’s sending me the correct way to where I’m going?

In terms of an update, we connect to Wi-Fi to download the maps and we typically do one map update per year. We have one coming up pretty soon in April, April or May, where we’re going to update the maps. But outside of that, when you’re out and about and navigating in the street and whatnot, you don’t need any kind of Wi-Fi connection. Everything is done offline, including the address recognition.

Oh, nice. So even that artificial intelligence part, I don’t have to actually have any connection or 5G or anything like that to get that kind of service?

Nope, that’s correct. It all works offline. It’s all on the device itself. We’ve introduced recently with a new patch that we’ve introduced, we’ve added a feature where if you do opt-in, all the images that you’ll be taking with the address recognition will be uploaded to our servers and that’ll help train our artificial intelligence models to recognize more and more addresses and increase our success rate. It is a purely opt-in feature and you will be asked the first time you get into the address recognition if you want to opt-in. If you choose not to opt-in, then your images won’t be sent at all.

Well, that’s the opposite of normal. Normally you have to find how to opt-out of those things. So I like that you guys are asking folks up front whether they want to actually be a part of that or not.

Yeah, for sure. We didn’t want to be intrusive and we understand that there are privacy concerns. We wouldn’t send any information that could potentially identify the user or anything like that. We also don’t send… because there is OCR on the device, so you can also use quick reading and detailed reading to read documents, to read your surroundings, signs on the wall or on the door or something like that. Those are not being sent. Those are purely stay on the device and they’re even deleted once the device is shut down. We only share anything that’s in relation to address recognition.

Awesome, awesome. Mathieu, you mentioned all the other devices that HumanWare’s had over the years and I know it started as mostly a GPS device and then things were added, like you said, podcast readers, things like that. What prompted the move to come back to just the GPS?

It was really some feedback from some customers that were saying that they would prefer having a dedicated GPS device. We know that some people still like to have a combined device, like a Swiss Army knife type of device, and that’s why the Victor Reader Trek is still available. As it stands now, it is still available for purchase at HumanWare. So if you really prefer, you’re more of the Swiss Army knife type of guy, you can definitely buy a Victor Reader Trek. But if you’re the kind of person who prefers having their screwdriver and their corkscrew as two separate tools, then the StellarTrek will be a much better fit. It allows us to really focus and do a deeper dive as it is dedicated.

One example I’ll give of that, is that we will have in the coming map update in April or May, we will be able to add a lot of information about bus stops in North America, and we also are looking into adding some traffic light information. So not only will we describe the intersection for the customer once they reach the intersection, but we’ll also be able to tell them if there are stop signs or traffic lights present to help them make a better decision in terms of crossing.

Oh, nice. That’s great, because I know the more information the better. I know when I first started doing this and playing with the standalone GPS devices and everything, it was a lot of, oh, a lot of beeping sometimes, and you had to drop your own landmarks and things. Once you got the hang of it it was still extremely helpful. But at the same time, I love that this actually has that intuitiveness. And the bus stop thing, I’m sure that probably came from some of your users-

Yes.

… as well, because I know that’s a… We do a lot of work with folks seeking employment and man, just getting to the job sometime is much harder than getting the job or even being successful at it. So that’s great that that’s a tool that they’re going to have in that toolbox.

Yep, for sure.

Mathieu, you mentioned the bus stops and other things coming. What else is coming down the pipeline, or are you guys working on to be able to add to this StellarTrek? Even if it’s a moonshot thing that may never happen, are there some things that you are working on or hoping to be able to get in there in future updates?

Stuff that we are definitely working on that I can talk about today is for the next version, which should again be coming up in April or May. We are looking into adding a barcode recognition for food and personal health products, such as toothpaste and stuff like that. So that is something that I’m actually just coming out of meeting where we discussed how we’re going to implement it, how we’re going to deal with unknown barcodes and whatnot, allow the user to put in their own. So if you scan, let’s say, a can of tomato soup and for some reason it’s not in the database because it’s a very local thing to where you live, you’ll be able to add manually the fact that it’s a can of tomato soup.

Then, we’re also looking into adding color recognition. That’s one of the things that is very much requested, to be able to take a shirt, scan it and then it’ll tell you this is a red shirt, this is a blue shirt, this is a light green shirt. So we are looking, and this is very preliminary work, but it is being looked into. That’s in the immediate future.

In the long term, we really want to make the StellarTrek be a personal assistant. We are looking into features such as object recognition, scene recognition. For example, let’s imagine a scenario where you run into a doctor’s office. You would be able to take your Stellar, do a quick scan of your environment, and then it would be able to tell you at three o’clock is the reception desk, at nine o’clock are a bunch of chairs. And then it might even be able to guide you to an empty chair, because it’s happened to, I think, every blind person in the world, that you accidentally sit on someone because you didn’t know they were in the chair. So we might even be able to tell you, “This chair is occupied, this chair’s free,” so you could get guidance to a chair. So that’s one of the things we’re also looking into. That’s more of a long-term thing.

And indoor navigation. That’s the Holy Grail of navigation. We are working with some companies, this is something that is a big endeavor, but this is something that we would like to eventually have on StellarTrek, is tools to help with indoor navigation.

Oh, that’d be great. Yeah, even talking since I’ve been doing this, there’s been different things come out for indoor navigation, other kind of, oh, just ways and stuff. Some of it works, some of it works sometimes, some of it works in certain places, but man, if there was just something that wherever I went inside if I could actually be able to navigate that would be great.

It’s funny that you bring up sitting on people. I have heard that story many, many a time from individuals. So yeah, being able to just have that, all that peace of mind. As we’re talking about the device being able to talk to me and tell me these kind of things, does it connect to a set of headphones, Bluetooth or something, so I can get that information without everyone around me hearing it?

Yeah, for sure. We have a 3.5 millimeter jack, so a standard headphones jack at the bottom of the device, but we also have Bluetooth where you can connect a pair of headphones or some people like to have a small… I’ve seen some people use it with a small speaker around their neck, because while the speaker on the StellarTrek is pretty good, if you’d like to have even bigger sound, you can buy a Bluetooth speaker, wear it like a collar around your neck. I’ve seen some people do that and they prefer it like that. So there’s all kinds of options. You can also use the Bluetooth as a keyboard. So if you don’t like navigating the keyboard using the keys, which is fairly simple but can be a bit cumbersome, you could also plug in a Bluetooth keyboard.

Oh, nice. Mathieu, just as you brought it up, I know it’s a little bit harder on a podcast, but can you describe what the device is like, as far as tactile buttons and things like that? I know HumanWare usually does a pretty good job of keeping the tactile buttons, which so many places it seems for the longest time was like, “Oh, we’re going to make everything touchscreen or real easy.” And it’s like, “No, no, no, no, no, if I can’t see it, that doesn’t help.” Can you describe what the user interface is like on the device?

Yeah, for sure. In terms of the device size, it’s about the size of a small remote control, like a TV remote control. So it’s not very big, it’s not super big. It’s about, I would say, I have a Pixel 7 Pro phone here and it’s less tall and it’s a bit smaller. It’s about 60 to 70% of the size of a Pixel 7 Pro phone. Our number one requirement was that this device be usable one-handed, because we know that in your other hand you’re going to be holding either a leash or a cane. This is not meant to replace your traditional O&M tools, this is meant as a supplement. This is meant to compliment and enhance your navigation skills. We wanted the device… So in your right hand you’ve got your cane or your dog, or your dog’s leash, and then in the left hand you’ve got your StellarTrek device.

That’s about the size it is. Then, on the front of the device, you’ve got in total nine buttons. There’s a back button, a go-to button, in the middle of the unit. Just below that is up, down, left, right, and confirm buttons. So the confirm is in the middle of the up, down, left, right. Then, at the bottom left you’ve got the where am I button, and at the bottom right you’ve got the voice button, because you could also use voice to input addresses.

We currently don’t have natural language processing. So for example, it’s not like you can do with Siri and say, “Hey, Siri, bring me to McDonald’s.” But once you’re in an addressed navigation field, it’s going to ask you which country, which city, which street and which number, and you can dictate that and it’ll give you guidance to that address you’ve given it.

Very cool. Very, very cool. It’s still nice, I can still use the voice even though I can’t say the McDonald’s at 5th and Main or something of that sort. It’s always something to do on down the road too.

Exactly. I was going to say it is something we are looking into adding. The problem with a lot of that is that the Siri and the Google Assistant and all that, they use the cloud. So basically you speak your command but then it connects to the cloud to get some results. We need to do everything on the device, as when you’re out and about and navigating in the field, you’re not connected to Wi-Fi. So it needs to be all on the device, but it is something that we are looking into adding in the future, yes.

That is a ton of data to try to put on there that probably changes quite frequently I imagine, so-

Yeah, for sure.

… I can see how that could definitely be a challenge. Well, Mathieu, you probably have quite a few of these, but can you tell me a story, a user story, of someone who really used the StellarTrek and how it really helped them with their independent travels?

Yeah, for sure. Internally at HumanWare we have quite a few of our employees who are themselves either low vision or blind. Some of our testers for this product are some of our early beta testers and our early adopters. We have several employees, I’m going to give a quick shout out to people like Jerome, [inaudible 00:22:57], who have been using this product for over a year now, even before it was released, and it helps them in their everyday navigation. They boot it up when they leave the home, they take the bus. It allows them to regain a lot of autonomy. Then, yeah, it allows them to be able to get proper guidance from home to work, work to home.

Yeah, we’ve even had, for example, Peter, who’s our director of strategic partnerships. I would’ve liked to have him on the podcast today, but he’s at the ATIA as we’re recording this. But he went camping last summer and basically what he did is… We have a feature on the StellarTrek called Routes where you can pre-record a route. As he was camping, he was out in the wild, obviously, in a place where there’s no roads, so he had the people he was camping with help him walk from the tent to the place where you go to the bathroom and then walk back. He recorded that as a route so that if he woke up at 2:00 AM and wanted to go to the bathroom, he wouldn’t have to wake someone up. He could simply activate the route on his StellarTrek, walk it, do his business, come back to the tent. So it’s all kinds of nice features like that. It is really designed with the blind user in mind.

That’s excellent. I love that you brought up the routes. It takes me back. The first GPS device I think I had was, well, long, long time ago, and it was for backpacking and that’s all it did was it bounced off, but it just showed you where you were, where you’d been and how to get back. I thought it was the coolest thing and nothing would ever be better, and nowadays it’s arcane technology. But I love that it does have that feature because so many times those are the trips we take, just that kind of way, or we’ve got a shortcut or the special way we want to go and everything else. So that’s awesome that that still does have that kind of feature in there, because, yeah, for camping, for really darn near, I bet, anything you do, besides just going to the corner store, it’s nice to have that route mapped out to be able to get there and back, so.

On college campuses, very often stuff like that. You can even record your route and export it and share it with a friend if you’d like.

Oh, nice. Very nice. Very nice. So then you can definitely bring them to you or at least show them where you’ve been and take them to the same places. So very-

That’s it.

… very cool. Well, Mathieu, if our listeners want to find out more about the StellarTrek, or even get one for themselves, what’s the best way for them to do that?

So, you can go on our website at www.humanware.com, or you can call our customer service team at 1 (800) 722- 3393, and one of my colleagues will be more than happy to give you any information you need.

Awesome. We will put all that information down in the show notes. Mathieu, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come on and tell us all about the StellarTrek. I’m sorry you won’t be at ATIA because then I’d probably get to see you down there because we’ll be leaving here tomorrow I believe to go down there. We’ll make sure to say hi to Peter while we’re down there.

Yeah, for sure. Go say hi to Peter and if you’re at CSUN then you’ll see me because I’ll be there at CSUN.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you again.

All right, thanks to you.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host.

This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye bye.