Smart Portable Assisted Device for Visually Impaired People

This paper aims to present a designed and developed version of a portable, low powered instrument to make lives of visually impaired people of the world, while they walk on road easier. About 47.7 million people in India suffer from moderate to severe vision problems, whereas 253 million visually impaired people are estimated in worldwide population. The issue is that there is no such production worthy prototype available to ease the travelling experience for these people. The intended device is built on low power embedded hardware and software technologies, sensors and sensing technologies, to harness for a social cause, serves to the need of the visually impaired people. The device is a miniaturized, non-invasive, portable, low power and convenient device for the blind people. It is able to detect the obstruction in front of a road upto a certain distance in all the three dimensions in space and also to detect the potholes or speed brakers on the road by a combination of pressure sensors and distance sensor embedding into the device. With varying distance of obstacle from the box attached to the walking stick, the speaker would respond with voice messages denoting the distance of obstruction in metres (m) so that he can be alerted. We designed an App that can be opened using the volume turn up button on an android phone, keeping in mind about our user's disabilities (as he is visually impaired). The entire data, i.e., his current location and intended destination, would be sent to anothr app in another android device that would be with his most confidential person/caregivers, wherein his current location would be monitored.