Wearable Navigation Assistance System for the Blind and Visually Impaired

The blind people cannot get information of their surrounding environment for example they cannot see any obstacles and hazards in their path. They have no information of objects in their surroundings and direction which is essential for travelling. According to World Health Organization (WHO) report there are 285 million visually impaired people among which 39 million are totally blind. The estimated number of blind people in Pakistan is 1.14 million. Blind people mostly use a white cane or a guide dog for their assistance. However, these techniques are limited as they do not guarantee risk avoidance for the blind people. Many researchers are working on assistance of blind people and have developed several devices including infrared cane, ultrasonic sensors, voice assisted navigation cane and laser-based walker assistance to name a few. Nevertheless, all these schemes are marred by limitations and as such are not utilised in real life. An assistance system was developed in this research work which is based on ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection. The ultrasonic sensors along with a vibration device and a buzzer are placed on multiple places in a wearable jacket. Sensors scan the environment of user and inform them through vibration and buzzer sound when the sensor detects any obstacle.

[1]  Osama Bader AL-Barrm,et al.  3D Ultrasonic Stick for Blind , 2014 .

[2]  K. I. Ramachandran,et al.  Performance comparison of Infrared and Ultrasonic sensors for obstacles of different materials in vehicle/ robot navigation applications , 2016 .

[3]  Ariffin Abdul Mutalib,et al.  Smart Cane: Assistive Cane for Visually-impaired People , 2011, ArXiv.

[4]  Akhilesh Krishnan,et al.  Autonomous walking stick for the blind using echolocation and image processing , 2016, 2016 2nd International Conference on Contemporary Computing and Informatics (IC3I).

[5]  Rupert R A Bourne,et al.  Prevalence of blindness and visual impairment in Pakistan: the Pakistan National Blindness and Visual Impairment Survey. , 2006, Investigative ophthalmology & visual science.

[6]  A. S. Al-Fahoum,et al.  A Smart Infrared Microcontroller-Based Blind Guidance System , 2013 .

[7]  D. Pascolini,et al.  Global estimates of visual impairment: 2010 , 2011, British Journal of Ophthalmology.

[8]  P. Ptasinski,et al.  A GPS based navigation aid for the blind , 2003, 17th International Conference on Applied Electromagnetics and Communications, 2003. ICECom 2003..

[9]  Ankit Agarwal,et al.  Ultrasonic Stick for Blind , 2015 .

[10]  Jörg Franke,et al.  Blind path obstacle detector using smartphone camera and line laser emitter , 2016, 2016 1st International Conference on Technology and Innovation in Sports, Health and Wellbeing (TISHW).

[11]  Katherine J. Kuchenbecker,et al.  HALO: Haptic Alerts for Low-hanging Obstacles in white cane navigation , 2012, 2012 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS).

[12]  Roy Paily,et al.  Blind Navigation Assistance for Visually Impaired based on Local Depth Hypothesis from a Single Image , 2013 .

[13]  Li Jiang,et al.  The Research on Blind Navigation System Based on RFID , 2007, 2007 International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing.

[14]  Ahmed F. Seddik,et al.  Assistive infrared sensor based smart stick for blind people , 2015, 2015 Science and Information Conference (SAI).

[15]  Sazali Yaacob,et al.  A Stereo Image Processing System for Visually Impaired , 2008 .

[16]  M. R. Adame,et al.  A Navigation Aid for Blind People with Walking Disabilities , 2014 .