Speaking monuments — design and implementation of an RFID based blind friendly environment

The research reported here, represents a navigation system for blinds — a compelling mobile application of wearable computing that would be not only a challenging task from research perspective, but also beneficial for society. The objective of this research is to create a portable, self-contained system that will allow visually impaired individuals to travel through familiar and unfamiliar environments without the assistance of guides. The user can get auditory clues about step-by-step walking guidance to move in an indoor environment. This paper focuses on the navigation design limited to a room and experiments show acceptable in-door accuracy. First portable prototype has been tested on a group of blind children from a training institute in Lahore, Pakistan. The real time experimentation results verify the significance of our designed system.