Development of Guiding Cane with Voice Notification for Visually Impaired individuals

Abstract

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.

An assistive model of obstacle detection based on deep learning: YOLOv3 for visually impaired people

“…Arakeri et al proposed a raspberry pi with NoIR camera to captures the readable material around the visually impaired and used a speech synthesis to generate sound in regional language [19]. Fink and Humayun [20], and more researcher [21,22] presented the invention for the visually impaired. A digital camera mounted on the person's eye or head is used to take snapshots of an image on demand and provided to an image processing algorithm.…”

Design and implementation of smart guided glass for visually impaired people

“…We found many works that give buzzer vibration, obstacles detection [4], [5], multisensory strategy [6] output when any object comes in front of the blind man. A guiding cane also generate voice instructions for blind individuals [7]. A walker contains an ultrasonic sensor [8], microcontroller integrated circuit (MIC) [9], vibrator which helps blind people during walking [10].…”

Visual, navigation and communication aid for visually impaired person

“…Rajalakshmi et al proposed the same technology but implemented object recognition with a convolution neural network [10]. Guevarra et al developed a cane with few ultrasonic sensors to get the idea of obstacles in different orientations as well as sense ascending and descending stairs and receive feedback through voice notification [11]. Rakshana and Chitra proposed a system to notify the obstacle and read the newspaper by optical character recognition [12].…”