Open Call 2 Winners

SAVAS-6G

Secure AI-powered vision assistant for blind users over 6G networks

A 6G-powered AI vision assistant that lets blind users see their world through conversation

People who are blind or visually impaired face daily challenges in reading, recognizing objects, and understanding their environment. While existing digital tools can provide some assistance, most solutions are either limited in functionality (basic text or object recognition) or depend heavily on cloud services, which can introduce delays, reliability issues, and privacy concerns. With the rapid evolution of 5G and beyond-5G networks, new opportunities are emerging to deliver smarter, faster, and more reliable assistive technologies.

The proposed project builds on CognitEye’s AI-powered vision assistant, a wearable system with a headset camera connected to a smartphone. Over the past four years, CognitEye has developed a working MVP that already offers on-device text reading and object finding. In this project, the system will be enhanced with conversational scene understanding, enabling blind users to ask open-ended questions about their surroundings and receive clear, spoken answers in real time. This is achieved by combining on-device AI for essential perception tasks with remote large language model (LLM) reasoning.

The main objectives of the project are to:

Make it faster and safer: To prove that splitting the AI work between the user’s phone (for quick tasks) and a super-fast 6G network (for complex understanding) makes the assistant more reliable, private, and responsive.
Give users real freedom: To help blind and visually impaired people become more independent by allowing them to ask natural questions about their surroundings and get instant, spoken answers.
Show what 6G can do: To create a working prototype that proves next-generation networks can power real-world tools that improve people’s lives.