London, United Kingdom

Making an innovative effort, 71-year-old blind entrepreneur Tom Pey created a service application called Waymap, which helps users find turns on public places like railway platforms, bus stops, and stadiums. 

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The application gives step-by-step directions, is accurate to the nearest metre, and works even when the mobile phone does not have any signal.

It also works underground, indoors and in places where the conventional services remain notoriously unreliable.

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The application is so accurate that it can guide people to the cheese counter in a supermarket or their seat in a football stadium.

Here's how the entrepreneur developed the navigation app 

The entrepreneur fell from the roof at the age of nine. However, he lost his eyesight 30 years later after his retinas got shattered due to the belated immune reaction to the twig which had gone up his nose.

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He later received a grant from Google's charitable arm, which helped him found Waymap in 2017. The company was able to raise an additional £7 million in another funding round later.

“When you lose your sight, your world shrinks to going to the chemist or the doctor’s. A third of people who lose their sight do not go out on their own again. It changed me as an individual into one who was afraid to go out alone. Waymap means I have got the ability to explore the world again like anybody else,” said Pey.

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He realised that blind or visually impaired people fail to rely on Google Maps and Apple Maps. 

“We saw that there was a problem for blind people, which actually mirrored a similar problem for everybody. Google Maps and its equivalents only work outdoors for some people, some of the time, and work indoors for no one," stated the entrepreneur.

The navigation application uses the global positioning system (GPS) sensor in smartphones to pinpoint the location. The results are precise if it is connected to a wi-fi network but can perform badly if the signal is weak.

Waymap does not depend on wi-fi but downloads a map of the venue and checks out where the movements are being traced by the users around it.

(With inputs from agencies)