Design and Development of a Wearable Assistive Device Integrating a Fuzzy Decision Support System for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Bouteraa, Yassine

doi:10.3390/mi12091082

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Semantic segmentation-based navigation [8] lacks scene descriptions and the ability to detect moving objects. Ultrasonic sensor-based safety orientation [9] cannot discern object details. A 3D sound rendering system [10] provides spatial information but lacks scene descriptions.…”

Section: E Insights Into the Operation Of The Perceptguide Aidmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Various other wearable mobility aids have also been developed to cater to the needs of blind or visually impaired individuals. For instance, a system using sensor data fusion and fuzzy logic-based decision-making offers safety orientation assistance [9]. Additionally, the StereoPilot, a head-mounted target location system, incorporates an RGB-D camera to capture and process 3D spatial information of the surroundings, providing users with intuitive navigation cues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

PerceptGuide: A Perception Driven Assistive Mobility Aid Based on Self-Attention and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Madake,

Bhatlawande,

Solanke

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper introduces a novel wearable aid, PerceptGuide to help for visually impaired individuals to perceive scene around them. It is designed as a wearable, light weight chest rig bag, that incorporates a monocular camera, ultrasonic sensors, vibration motors, and a mono-earphone, powered by an embedded Nvidia Jetson development board. The system provides directional obstacle alerts through the vibration motors, allowing users to avoid obstacles on their path. A user-friendly pushbutton enables user to inquire about scene information in front of them. The scene details are effectively conveyed through a novel scene understanding approach, that combines multi-scale feature fusion, selfattention models, and a multilayer GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) architecture on the ResNet50 backbone. The proposed system generates coherent and descriptive captions by capturing image features at different scales, enhancing the quality and contextual understanding of the scene details. The selfattention in both the encoder (ResNet50 + Feature fusion model) and decoder (multilayer GRU), effectively captures long-range dependencies and attend to relevant image regions. The quantitative evaluations conducted on the MSCOCO and Flicker8k datasets show the effectiveness of the model with improved Bleu-67.7, RougeL -47.6, Meteor -22.7 and CIEDR-67.4 scores. The PerceptGuide system exhibits exceptional real-time performance, generating audible captions in just 1.5 to 2 seconds. This rapid response time significantly aids visually impaired individuals in understanding the scenes around them. The qualitative evaluation of the aid emphasizes its real-time performance, demonstrating the generation of context-aware, semantically meaningful captions. This validates its potential as a wearable assistive aid for visually impaired people, with the added advantages of low power consumption, compactness, and a lightweight design.

show abstract

Section: E Insights Into the Operation Of The Perceptguide Aidmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

PerceptGuide: A Perception Driven Assistive Mobility Aid Based on Self-Attention and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Madake,

Bhatlawande,

Solanke

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, only 14% of these solutions can be used in real-life scenarios with some degree of success, 29% of them are practical but have a combination of either high cost or require from the user to carry many sensors, 24% are limited practicality for specific scenarios while 32% are purely experimental. N/A N/A 5 m 95% [52] 0 m < R < 9 m 98% [53] ✖ 0.1 m < R < 3.5 m 90-95% [54] N/A N/A N/A N/A [55] N/A N/A 0.2 m < R < 10 m N/A [56] ✖ R > 2 m N/A [57] ✖ N/A N/A [58] 2 cm < R < 4.5 m N/A [59] ✖ N/A 67-98% [60] 2 cm < R < 12 m N/A and camera sensors is expected given the proliferation of smartphone devices as the preferred platform for developing solutions for the BVI individuals. Finally, only 14% of these solutions can be used in real-life scenarios with some degree of success, 29% of them are practical but have a combination of either high cost or require from the user to carry many sensors, 24% are limited practicality for specific scenarios while 32% are purely experimental.…”

Section: Papermentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Sensor Data Fusion Solutions for Blind and Visually Impaired: Research and Commercial Navigation Applications for Indoor and Outdoor Spaces

Theodorou

Tsiligkos

Μηλιώνης

2023

Sensors

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Several assistive technology solutions, targeting the group of Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI), have been proposed in the literature utilizing multi-sensor data fusion techniques. Furthermore, several commercial systems are currently being used in real-life scenarios by BVI individuals. However, given the rate by which new publications are made, the available review studies become quickly outdated. Moreover, there is no comparative study regarding the multi-sensor data fusion techniques between those found in the research literature and those being used in the commercial applications that many BVI individuals trust to complete their everyday activities. The objective of this study is to classify the available multi-sensor data fusion solutions found in the research literature and the commercial applications, conduct a comparative study between the most popular commercial applications (Blindsquare, Lazarillo, Ariadne GPS, Nav by ViaOpta, Seeing Assistant Move) regarding the supported features as well as compare the two most popular ones (Blindsquare and Lazarillo) with the BlindRouteVision application, developed by the authors, from the standpoint of Usability and User Experience (UX) through field testing. The literature review of sensor-fusion solutions highlights the trends of utilizing computer vision and deep learning techniques, the comparison of the commercial applications reveals their features, strengths, and weaknesses while Usability and UX demonstrate that BVI individuals are willing to sacrifice a wealth of features for more reliable navigation.

show abstract

“…These devices integrate sensing and feedback systems of various natures. Sensing ranges from computer vision technology to scanning devices and microphones [ 10 – 13 ], while feedback systems span from audio devices to haptic accessories [ 14 – 17 ]. These sensory substitution systems rely on data acquired from the sensing system to infer the presence of obstacles in the surroundings of the user, who can negotiate obstacles based on the information relayed by the feedback system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual reality as a means to explore assistive technologies for the visually impaired

Ricci

Boldini

et al. 2023

PLOS Digit Health

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Visual impairment represents a significant health and economic burden affecting 596 million globally. The incidence of visual impairment is expected to double by 2050 as our population ages. Independent navigation is challenging for persons with visual impairment, as they often rely on non-visual sensory signals to find the optimal route. In this context, electronic travel aids are promising solutions that can be used for obstacle detection and/or route guidance. However, electronic travel aids have limitations such as low uptake and limited training that restrict their widespread use. Here, we present a virtual reality platform for testing, refining, and training with electronic travel aids. We demonstrate the viability on an electronic travel aid developed in-house, consist of a wearable haptic feedback device. We designed an experiment in which participants donned the electronic travel aid and performed a virtual task while experiencing a simulation of three different visual impairments: age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and glaucoma. Our experiments indicate that our electronic travel aid significantly improves the completion time for all the three visual impairments and reduces the number of collisions for diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. Overall, the combination of virtual reality and electronic travel aid may have a beneficial role on mobility rehabilitation of persons with visual impairment, by allowing early-phase testing of electronic travel aid prototypes in safe, realistic, and controllable settings.

show abstract

Design and Development of a Wearable Assistive Device Integrating a Fuzzy Decision Support System for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Cited by 24 publications

References 36 publications

PerceptGuide: A Perception Driven Assistive Mobility Aid Based on Self-Attention and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

PerceptGuide: A Perception Driven Assistive Mobility Aid Based on Self-Attention and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Multi-Sensor Data Fusion Solutions for Blind and Visually Impaired: Research and Commercial Navigation Applications for Indoor and Outdoor Spaces

Virtual reality as a means to explore assistive technologies for the visually impaired

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About