Every day, Indirani Sankari, a petite 23-year-old schoolteacher in Mumbai, commutes between a western suburb and the city’s southeastern edge. The trek takes two hours, three trains, and a lot of walking—each way. But that’s not the most painful part. Sankari is visually impaired, and her route is a gauntlet of threats: signboards, glass doors, benches, stray animals. “I’ve been attacked by dogs and cows, and I’ve been hurt everywhere,” she says. In the past year, though, Sankari has managed to get to and from work largely unscathed. For this, she thanks her SmartCane, a device that sits atop her regular walking stick and uses ultrasonic beams to scan her surroundings. Whenever she approaches an obstacle, the contraption buzzes against her palm, intensifying the vibrations the closer she gets. The…
