Element A: PRESENTATION AND JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROBLEM

Problem Statement:

People who are visually impaired have a hard time identifying the value of currency with 62% of a study's participants indicating that they gave someone the incorrect nomination of money in the past year. This problem potentially affects the 1.02 million blind people living in the US and continues to affect their autonomy and ability to enjoy life.

Problem Background/statistics

In the U.S. alone there are 1.02 million legally blind people (the majority being adults whilst a fraction includes children under the age of 1) (The Burden of Vision Loss, 2020) and they all at some point in their lives need to pay for groceries, services, and utilities. The problem is that the American currency does not include braille on its paper money, resulting in the blind needing to find unique alternatives to this problem. One solution that exists is the money brailler; a stamp that allows the user to stamp the braille equivalent of the dollar amount onto a bill. Another example is the iBill, a hand-held device that will read the amount aloud when putting a dollar under a sensor in the machine. Although these are good inventions on their own, there are major drawbacks to them. The money brailler quote "painfully punches holes in my fingers faster than it does the paper" from S. Brothers on the Amazon reviews page. The iBill isn't any better either, claiming it is affordable yet going for $149.00 on their website. The goal for this project is to make a combination of these devices that helps people and is affordable to the 27.7% of visually impaired people living below the poverty line and many more according to the National Institutes of Health's article; Study Finds Most Americans Have Good Vision, But 14 Million Are Visually Impaired.

Chart 2: See that current solutions to this problem are not efficient enough (this is from the general population)

Chart 3: from the category of people who are blind or are close to someone who is blind they reported that they would use cash more often if it was easier to use.

Scholarly Articles

• "Almost 20 million Americans — 8 percent of the U.S. population — have visual impairments. Visual impairments, including blindness, are one of the leading causes of loss of independence among people age 65 and older" (Visual Impairments - Health Policy Institute, 2019).

• ".. 70% felt vulnerable using cash, 62% gave someone incorrect denominations in a transaction in the past year, 60% indicated they would use currency more often if it was easier for them to use (in particular, avoiding the need for folding and sorting notes), 59% relied on someone at the point of sale to tell them what denominations they were receiving..." (Study to Address Options for Enabling the Blind and Visually Impaired Community to Denominate U.S. Currency, 2009).

• "As of September 6, 2022, the program has distributed approximately 92,733 iBill electronic currency readers, and its customer service call center has handled 14,210 calls from currency-reader users or potential users," (AMERICAN COUNCIL OF THE BLIND, Et Al., Plaintiffs, V. JANET YELLEN, Secretary of the Treasury, 2022).