An IoT smart clothing system for the visually impaired using NFC technology

Abstract

The selection of appropriate clothing to match one's daily life is an important ritual for individuals across the globe. But this can be a Herculean task, especially for the visually impaired. Together with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and enabling technologies, solutions to improve the quality of life for visually impaired people have arisen. This paper proposes an IoT-based smart clothing system (EZwear) to enable visually impaired individuals to select and find appropriate clothing within their closets. The main underlying technical components in the solution are the use of an NFC (Near Field Communication) and a smartphone and its applications. By combining these technologies, we can transform a smartphone into an NFC reader that can provide sound information to the visually impaired user. The system enhances the ability of the visually impaired person to independently and comfortably manage their closets. The results show that the system performed reasonably and achieved the usability requirements.

Automatic system to identify and manage garments for blind people

“…As future development of this work, a possible physical implementation of a wardrobe to help blind people was presented in [10]. Additionally, R. Alabduljabbar et al presented a system that integrates NFC technology with a smartphone, allowing visually impaired people to choose the desired clothes [15]. A similar solution was proposed in [16] by S. J. V. Gatis Filho et al that also explores NFC technology combined with Quick Response (QR) technology with the main goal of developing a clothing matching system with audio description.…”

“…Besides all efforts to develop systems to help blind people, except for solutions presented in [4], [5], [15], and [16], the systems in Table 1 focus on solutions that help people without any disability. As the project encompasses the recognition and identification of garments' colours, it was necessary to identify solutions that help blind people in the detection of the colours.…”

“…MyEyes [4], [5] Manage garments with RFID "An IoT smart clothing system for the visually impaired using NFC technology" [15] Manage garments based on NFC technology "My best shirt with the right pants: improving the outfits of visually impaired people with QR codes and NFC tags" [16] Manage garments based on the combination of NFC and QR technology "Developing a smart wardrobe system" [17] Adds clothing items to the wardrobe based on RFID tags reading Echo Look [18] Suggests advice based on weather and personal trend Fashion API [19] Adds clothing items to the virtual wardrobe based on QR code reading Smart Closet [20] Adds clothing items to the virtual wardrobe based on photo capture TailorTags [21] Adds clothing items to the virtual wardrobe based on wireless tags detection spatial limits of each garment and next, the features are identified. The results were obtained using two datasets: Fashionista with 685 images and CFPD with 2682 images.…”

A Design and Application of Municipal Service Platform Based on Cloud-Edge Collaboration for Smart Cities

“…Examples include smart sensors for automatic inventory checking, gas or water meters in residential basements, and pet or personal asset trackers. The other includes Near Field Communication (NFC) [48], Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) [49], Bluetooth [50], and Zigbee [51], which are mainly used in short-distance communication scenarios, such as mobile payment, home automation, and personal consumer electronics. Different networks have different bandwidth, propagation delay, and link quality.…”