World’s First Hands Free Smartphone: Sesame

An Israeli start-up company Sesame Enable has developed the world’s first hands free smartphone for the physically challenged. The hands free  smartphone allows the disabled users to control it via head movements and has been specially designed for people with spinal cord injuries, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), cerebral palsy and other disabilities that hamper the use of hands and arms.
One of the most intriguing things about the Sesame hands free smartphone is that its co-founder, Giora Livne is a quadriplegic, who lost all but the smallest movements in his neck in an accident nine years ago.He came up with the idea when watching a TV Demonstration of a game controlled by head movements.
Prior to the phone’s development, Livne  was completely dependent on the people around him. Determined to change that he set himself to developing the smartphone.

“My life quality jumped from the Stone Age to the smartphone age” Giora Livne said.

Livne is now able to regularly respond to texts, Whatsapp his friends and family, which according to him helps ease some of the social isolation experienced by disabled people.
The Sesame is a Google Nexus 5 Android Phone and boasts of proprietary head tracking technology along with an advanced computer vision algorithm.The hands free smartphone’s front-facing camera tracks user’s head movements and allows them to control a cursor on screen. The cursor is essentially a virtual finger, letting users do what others can with a regular smartphone.
Sesame also recently won a Verizon Powerful Answers Award along with $1 million in prize money. One of the cheekiest facts- The phone turns on with just two words- “Open Sesame”.