Faced with this, the world's non-profit agencies, and governments at all levels, from the United Nations on down, put their major funding into medical priorities. This leaves rehabilitation a poor cousin. Therefore, because few people realize that we can now employ advanced technologies to help the blind navigate, and because there are no funds available to address rehabilitation, there has been and will not be global governmental efforts to address this issue. If we are to bring energy to bear on this issue, we will have to do it ourselves. Science and engineering are two different worlds.
Science provides the knowledge that engineers use to create tools.
Computation power will evolve because science has already given us enough knowledge to create sophisticated navigational tools. However, part of the task of supporting the efforts of inventors and engineers, is to help gather and organize an exponentially exploding flood of new knowledge. This means that not only will we have to push for the application of navigational technology for the blind, we will also have to actively gather and organize the knowledge that we need . At The Institute for Innovative Blind Navigation, we study and monitor emerging navigational technologies, we look at various performance categories. For now, we will describe what is available, what is on the horizon, and promising lines of research.