Digital Travel Lanyard

Introduction

Traveling with hidden or visible disability can be very difficult. Often requiring mobility asistance and extra information. The difficulty of communicating these needs is amplified when traveling through other countries or unfamiliar areas.

Individuals are often left with difficulty interactions to tell someone they require asistance or alert someone of an issue. Perhaps even having to provide context for additional asistance. For example, "Excuse me, I have a visual impairment, do you have an adapted device I can use?" These requests can be daunting and uncomfortable even in familiar places and scenarios.

Individuals often talk about these situations as 'stressful' or a 'struggle'.

These interactions can be minimised with the use of disability lanyards. These are cards which display important information about an individaul such as their disability, support preferences and sometimes identifiction. It's important to note the use of these lanyards depends on the individual. For some they are useful, for others they do not wish to share such information. It's down to personal preference. These situations can become very daunting when traveling abroad such as using a foreign transport system or public service. Language is often the biggest problem in these situations. For instance, a reddit user describes being unable to communicate a disorder in a Columbian airport as they were experiencing a meltdown, and were unable to fully communicate is spanish.

To sumarise

• Individuals sometimes find it difficult to communicate their disability and requirements to others.
• Lanyards are used to try to make these interactions easier.
• Some people do not like these lanyards for various reasons including them being too descriptive and wish for something different.
• These issues are amplified when traveling such as enganging with foreign transport, public services and tourist activities

Goals

• Provide users with multiple language support.
• Hands free control option to aid physical disabilty.
• Customised information displays, allowing users to disclose only the information they are comfortable with.
• Tailored information for multiple disabilities.
• Abilty to change the amount/type of information depending on the situation.

Introducing, Digi-Lanyard!

With the purpose of achieving the goals above, Digi-Lanyard uses an e-paper display to show personalised disability information about the user. The user can cycle through supported languages such as English, French, Spanish and German and only show the information the are comfortable with.

Hardware & build

Using a LILYGO T5-4.7 E-Paper to handle processing and displaying information. Powered by an 18650 cell to make it portable. The 3D Printed case and lanyard attachment points allows users to wear and use the device with ease.

This hardware was chosen as it is simple, pre-built and easy to aquire and assemble for most people. You can just buy an E-paper display and battery, flash the code onto it and 3D print the case, done!

Code

Written in C/++, the device has a wake/sleep function to set the display and then power down to save charge (first left most button). Users can adjust the language by clicking the middle button at the top of the lanyard. Cycling through the currrently available languages. In the future, I want to implement a companion app that users can use to connect to the device and change the specific information shown as well as create presets for how much information they wish to share. Furthermore, the ability to change the language automatically depending on the detected region is very important. There are mulitple approaches to this, possibly by scanning the available wifi networks and comparing to a dataset/region prediction model, smartphone location information via the companion app or even detecting the spoken lanugage via microphone and language model. This functionality is not supported yet but I am working on it!

Videodemonstration