Kumi - Blind Fashion application

Kumi Clothing seeks to help the visually impaired become confident, independent shoppers by providing them the tools they need to not only identify, but match clothing items.

Why Kumi?

Kumi Clothing was brought to Change++ by Vandy Alumnus Michelle She when she noticed the disadvantages faced by the visually impaired community in both professional and educational settings. Having visual impairments can oftentimes be an obstacle to one's fashion sense, which is especially important when it comes to finding that first interview outfit, navigating the education scene with your peers, or even in everyday life situations.

What does Kumi do?

Our app is a modern solution to this issue that many people face. By using NFC technology, users of the Kumi Clothing App can easily scan a tag on an item of clothing and hear the physical attributes of the item such as the color, size, material, etc. After creating an account, users can store clothing items in their closet for easy access later, and continue scanning new items. Kumi allows its users to be more independent shoppers and removes the need to have someone with them while shopping to help them identify clothing.

NFC tag updated.png — What is NFC?

NFC stands for Near Field Communication, and the name basically states its function! NFC tags allow for the transmission of small pieces of information between electronic devices within a short distance. Most smartphones today have the ability to read these tags built into the system, with Apple Pay being one of the prominent examples of NFC use. Kumi uses NFC tags as identification labels for clothing items. After the user taps their smartphone on the NFC tag attached to the clothing item, our app is able to retrieve the information stored about that specific item from our databases and read it out loud to the user.

What now?

Kumi clothing strives to be an example of how apps can be made accessible to the visually impaired without sacrificing aesthetics or functionality. Currently, our app is in the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) stage and has the identification functionality, however Michelle hopes to use our MVP to receive further funding from investors to then incorporate the clothing match functionality, which would include aspects of machine learning and object recognition. After retrieving the clothing attributes through the identification stage, the matching stage would allow the app to make outfit suggestions to the user based on the user’s personal preferences and physical attributes such as skin tone, hair color, etc while also being able to match outfits based on common color schemes.