E-cane with Situation Presumption for the Visually Impaired

The E-cane is an electronic aid equipment for the visually impaired to widely detect the obstacles that normal white cane cannot reach. We propose a situation presumption algorithm, "Wall/Floor-strategy" for the E-cane, which is capable of detecting the presuming the condition of spot where the blind user is stepping into. When some obstacles are recognised, E-cane informs the user about the types of the obstacles;the walls, gaps, stairs and so on by vibration and voice. This paper presents our proto-type implementation and some experimental results, that show the effectiveness of the proposed system.