Alibaba’s tech set to empower persons with disabilities

“The next 30 years are going to be critical for the world. Make the technology inclusive, make the world change,” remarked Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba, at the World Economic Forum in 2017. It’s a mantra that has been taken seriously by Alex Li, the GM of Alibaba Cloud South Asia, the cloud computing arm of the firm. He said, “One of Alibaba Cloud’s missions is to build a technologically collaborative society with our ecosystem partners, so that we can synergise our creativity and problem solving skills to tackle the critical problems faced by the community,” Alex told DTNext.

“By doing so, we can nurture future leaders of India to formulate solutions to make the country a better place for all citizens,” he asserted.

Here are a few interventions by the Group to usher in inclusivity:

One of China’s largest e-marketplaces, Taobao, a subsidiary of Alibaba Group, has added an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to its platform. This AI-driven system reads text written on images. Prior to introduction of OCR, Taobao’s 300,000 daily users who are blind or have reduced vision, would have heard their screen-reading software announcing ‘image’ on the page, the company said. “Images are becoming ever more important in the shopping experience. A typical product page on Taobao contains 40 images, and most product descriptions are found within images. The newly added OCR technology can dramatically help to enhance shopping experience of visual impaired people,’ it added.

Alibaba’s research institute DAMO Academy (Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook), along with Tsinghua University in Beijing, also developed silicone sheets to go on top of smartphones to help vision impaired use its shopping sites.

Over 100 million senior citizens are suffering from Alzheimer’s. To make their lives easier, a team of Alibaba Cloud engineers recently transformed the home of a patient by leveraging IoT and introducing a remote caring system. “The patient’s children can download an app, connected to IoT-enabled censors at home, via which they can monitor the patient’s situation in real-time. A smart box is also placed at home, which will send an alert to the patient’s smart device (like mobile phone) when it is time to take medicines,” the company said.

With verbal commands, a person can ask Alibaba’s smart speaker, Tmall Genie, to adjust temperature, turn on lights, TV. This was demonstrated by the firm at an elderly home in Beijing. For the elderly with limited mobility, voice becomes a medium to test the latest AI technologies.

The company’s AI Labs, along with Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore, and Pacific Parkinson’s Research Centre, Canada, are in the process of developing a mobile game named ‘Pumpkin Park’ to gather analytics from patients.