Some apps are there just to entertain you. Other are developed to solve actual real-life problems and to make the world a better place. That’s the case of SeeLight – the app that is trying to help blind and visually impaired users to cross a street in a safe way.

The idea behind the app is simple: to inform blind and visually impaired people where is the crossing and how many seconds they have left to cross the street at a traffic light. It will also direct them back on the right direction if they start to walk out of the crosswalk. Sound simple and useful.

The real challenge is how to make this kind of data available for app users. There are two scenarios. If a city has a modern central system for the traffic lights management it can share a data stream with the app. As we might imagine it can be difficult to obtain… that’s why developers found an interesting alternative. They’ve created a second app for everyone to crowdsource data about street crossings.

As someone stands at a street corner, they can push a start and stop button to time the length of the walk signal, or point their smartphone at the traffic light to help create an augmented reality feature for people with limited vision. The app also asks questions like whether an intersection has raised, tactile bumps to help someone cross. It automatically adds a GPS tag for each light as the data is crowdsourced.

I’ve got couple of concerns about the data accuracy like how will the app knows that the light is already green or not. Nonetheless it’s one of apps that are definitely worth mentioning.