Android Assistant EyeMate for Blind and Blind Tracker

At present many blind assistive systems have been implemented but there is no such kind of good system to navigate a blind person and also to track the movement of a blind person and rescue him/her if he/she is lost. In this paper, we have presented a blind assistive and tracking embedded system. In this system the blind person is navigated through a spectacle interfaced with an android application. The blind person is guided through Bengali/English voice commands generated by the application according to the obstacle position. Using voice command a blind person can establish voice call to a predefined number without touching the phone just by pressing the headset button. The blind assistive application gets the latitude and longitude using GPS and then sends them to a server. The movement of the blind person is tracked through another android application that points out the current position in Google map. We took distances from several surfaces like concrete and tiles floor in our experiment where the error rate is 5%.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1611.09480 by other autho

Development of Guiding Cane with Voice Notification for Visually Impaired individuals

Navigation in the physical environment is a challenge for those people who have very limited sense of sight or no vision at all. Assistive technologies for blind mobilization is not new and always have a room for improvement. Moreover, these assistive devices are limited in terms of its sensing and feedback abilities. This paper presents a microcontroller-based guiding stick capable of detecting several conditions of the environment such as obstacles in front, left and right positions of the user and detects ascending and descending staircases. The feedback is delivered by an audio output which dictates the direction to go or what condition the sensor detects in front of the user. Technical evaluation proves that the device was functional in terms of its accuracy, responsiveness and correctness. On the other hand, in the actual evaluation of the device with the visually impaired individuals, the device did not perform efficiently. It was also found that the device has the potential to be used effectively by the visually impaired who acquired their blindness in later stage of their life provided that they will have a proper training in using the device while navigating in the physical environment

Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually-Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that there are 285 million visually impaired people worldwide. Among these individuals, there are 39 million who are totally blind. There have been several systems designed to support visually-impaired people and to improve the quality of their lives. Unfortunately, most of these systems are limited in their capabilities. In this paper, we present a comparative survey of the wearable and portable assistive devices for visuallyimpaired people in order to show the progress in assistive technology for this group of people. Thus, the contribution of this literature survey is to discuss in detail the most significant devices that are presented in the literature to assist this population and highlight the improvements, advantages, disadvantages, and accuracy. Our aim is to address and present most of the issues of these systems to pave the way for other researchers to design devices that ensure safety and independent mobility to visually-impaired people.https://doi.org/10.3390/s1703056

A Highly Accurate And Reliable Data Fusion Framework For Guiding The Visually Impaired

The world has approximately 285 million visually impaired (VI) people according to a report by the World Health Organization. Thirty-nine million people are estimated to be blind, whereas 246 million people are estimated to have impaired vision. An important factor that motivated this research is the fact that 90% of VI people live in developing countries. Several systems have been designed to improve the quality of the life of VI people and support the mobility of VI people. Unfortunately, none of these systems provides a complete solution for VI people, and the systems are very expensive. Therefore, this work presents an intelligent framework that includes several types of sensors embedded in a wearable device to support the visually impaired (VI) community. The proposed work is based on an integration of sensor-based and computer vision-based techniques in order to introduce an efficient and economical visual device. The designed algorithm is divided to two components: obstacle detection and collision avoidance. The system has been implemented and tested in real-time scenarios. A video dataset of 30 videos and an average of 700 frames per video was fed to the system for the testing purpose. The achieved 96.53% accuracy rate of the proposed sequence of techniques that are used for real-time detection component is based on a wide detection view that used two camera modules and a detection range of approximately 9 meters. The 98% accuracy rate was obtained for a larger dataset. However, the main contribution in this work is the proposed novel collision avoidance approach that is based on the image depth and fuzzy control rules. Through the use of x-y coordinate system, we were able to map the input frames, whereas each frame was divided into three areas vertically and further 1/3 of the height of that frame horizontally in order to specify the urgency of any existing obstacles within that frame. In addition, we were able to provide precise information to help the VI user in avoiding front obstacles using the fuzzy logic. The strength of this proposed approach is that it aids the VI users in avoiding 100% of all detected objects. Once the device is initialized, the VI user can confidently enter unfamiliar surroundings. Therefore, this implemented device can be described as accurate, reliable, friendly, light, and economically accessible that facilitates the mobility of VI people and does not require any previous knowledge of the surrounding environment. Finally, our proposed approach was compared with most efficient introduced techniques and proved to outperform them

Voice Warning to Identify Distance to Obstacles on Smart Cane for Blind People

Blind people are often hampered in their mobility, while currently available assistive technology includes manual sticks and electronic mobility devices. Currently, the development of smart canes is still being carried out in many studies. Smart cane works by detecting the distance of the cane to obstacles in front of you. From detecting this distance, the response the user gets is generally in the form of vibrations and sounds from the buzzer. The sound provided by the buzzer cannot differentiate the distance between obstacles. Therefore, this study proposes the existence of additional sound playback responses to differentiate far, middle, and near obstacles. Apart from that, the design of the prototype refers to the shape of a flashlight. The smart cane is designed using an Arduini UNO microcontroller with a rechargeable battery power supply with three response components, namely two ISD 1820 modules connected to a speaker to detect long distances (201-300 cm) with a "Hati-hati" sound and medium distances (101-200 cm) with an "Awas" sound, as well as a buzzer and piezoelectric component in the form of a "beep" sound and vibration for close distances (1-100 cm) to obstacles. The result is that both the ultrasonic sensor and response components work according to design. Apart from that, the rechargeable battery supply feature and the implementation of the prototype design make it easier for users to store and use for daily activities

State of the art review on walking support system for visually impaired people

The technology for terrain detection and walking support system for blind people has rapidly been improved the last couple of decades but to assist visually impaired people may have started long ago. Currently, a variety of portable or wearable navigation system is available in the market to help the blind for navigating their way in his local or remote area. The focused category in this work can be subgroups as electronic travel aids (ETAs), electronic orientation aids (EOAs) and position locator devices (PLDs). However, we will focus mainly on electronic travel aids (ETAs). This paper presents a comparative survey among the various portable or wearable walking support systems as well as informative description (a subcategory of ETAs or early stages of ETAs) with its working principal advantages and disadvantages so that the researchers can easily get the current stage of assisting blind technology along with the requirement for optimising the design of walking support system for its users

Vision-Based Tactile Paving Detection Method in Navigation Systems for Visually Impaired Persons

In general, a visually impaired person relies on guide canes in order to walk outside besides depending only on a tactile pavement as a warning and directional tool in order to avoid any obstructions or hazardous situations. However, still a lot of training is needed in order to recognize the tactile pattern, and it is quite difficult for persons who have recently become visually impaired. This chapter describes the development and evaluation of vision-based tactile paving detection method for visually impaired persons. Some experiments will be conducted on how it works to detect the tactile pavement and identify the shape of tactile pattern. In this experiment, a vision-based method is proposed by using MATLAB including the Arduino platform and speaker as guidance tools. The output of this system based on the result found from tactile detection in MATLAB then produces auditory output and notifies the visually impaired about the type of tactile detected. Consequently, the development of tactile pavement detection system can be used by visually impaired persons for easy detection and navigation purposes

Voice Maps for Visually Impaired with Obstacle Detection

The paper presents the architecture and implementation of a system that will help the visually impaired people to navigate using GPS technology. The system provides artificial guidance to the visually impaired through known paths, that is the path for navigation has to be already stored in the microcontroller. The current latitude and longitude values of the user are obtained using GPS. These values are continuously compared with the already stored value in the microcontroller. Thus helps the blind in navigation. The goal is to create a portable, simple and less costly system that will allow user to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the aid of guides. Also it provides voice recognition to detect obstacles. The obstacles are detected using three ultrasonic sensors, which are placed on the left, right, and front positions of the blind. The commands and messages are played back to the blind via APR9600 voice playback IC. The keypad used in system allows the user to select the desired locations to which he/she wishes to go. Keypad consists of 12 keys where each key represents a location. Blind selects the key using Braille language. The paper focuses on the development and evaluation of a Navigation system that makes use of Global Positioning System, voice and ultrasonic sensor for obstacle detection

Empowering the Visually Impaired: Arduino Mega Enhanced Accessibility Device

People with vision impairments find their life to be so difficult that they must rely on others even for the most basic tasks. When a user is in trouble, the developed system may identify obstacles and persons, play an audio message, and notify the carer. It delivers auditory output in order to help blind individuals recognise persons and text using Open CV and face recognition. Real-time image processing requirements are met by using a small amount of memory and extremely little processing time. The suggested system delivers a very competitive performance that matches the advantages of portability and ease of use, according to the performance comparison