Blind Man Completes Solo 5K with AI App to Guide Him

A blind man completed a five-kilometer (3.1 miles) run through New York City’s Central Park Thursday without using a guide dog or human runner.

Instead, he turned to an artificial intelligence technology app that operates using a smartphone and headphones.

“The safest thing for a blind man is to sit still. I ain’t sitting still,” Thomas Panek, 50, who lost his sight in his early 20s due to a genetic condition and is CEO of a guide dog school, told Reuters.

The running enthusiast and head of Guiding Eyes for the Blind got tired of having to rely on slower runners to guide him, so he decided in 2019 that he had to find a way to run solo.

Panek said he turned to Google to find a way for an app to “tell” him “where to go.”

Panek worked with Alphabet Inc. to create a research program. A smartphone camera detects a “guideline” on a running track, and an app detects the runner’s position and gives the runner audio guidance through headphones.

“It’s a real feeling of not only freedom and independence, but also, you know, you get that sense that you’re just like anybody else,” Panek said after a test of his app on a chilly afternoon in Central Park Thursday.