Mubser: When Visually Impaired People 'Recover' Their Eyesight

Credit: Flickr

Mubser ( مُـبْـــــصِـــر ) is another example of a start-up that could truly revolutionize the life of many people. Besides it's not everyday I talk about an African start-up! Mubser was founded by Khaled Shady in Cairo with three other computer engineering graduates from Menoufia University. Its mission is to assist visually impaired or blind people in their everyday life, with a navigational aid tool that uses ingenious technologies.

How does it work? The pilot product, SensifyTM (only a prototype so far), is a wearable belt working with a Bluetooth headset.Thanks to a 3D depth camera, the product is able to recognize many common obstacles (walls, chairs, tables, staircases, ...), and then to notify the user through an inbuilt audio device or by making vibrations. And this is only the beginning, Shady's dream is to add more and more features so that blind people can almost completely imagine their surroundings. "It’s about the future for them; that’s how I keep thinking about the platform itself. So in the next five years I see Mubser as being the sixth sense that they depend on", says Shady.


Mubser is the kind of start-up you really hope to grow. Its CEO is only 22 years old (about my age) and it's impressive he gets into something that difficult. The story behind its foundation is moving: Khaled Shady wanted to help a close friend who, because of a car accident, lost his eyesight at the age of 15.This can happen to anyone and so suddenly, it's scary! Mubser is now incubated at Venture Lab at the American University in Cairo, but their biggest issue according to the CEO is that there's no manufacturing industry in Egypt. Hence they are trying to find partners in the USA or China but it's not an easy thing to do.

Since it's not exactly a piece of cake to get a guide dog, creating technologies that could quite replace them is a really good thing. Of course you could never replace the happiness of owning a dog but you could still truly help blind people.

Further reading:

http://mubser.com/  (there's pretty much nothing on the website yet)
http://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/young-ceo-invents-navigational-technology-for-the-blind/34327/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2014/02/13/seven-innovative-products-from-africa-you-should-know/
https://www.facebook.com/mubser/