Location Tracking for Blind Swimmers

Blindness is one of the most severe form of visual impairment that decreases the ability of a person to perform their day to day tasks. A blind person has to rely on another person for performing their everyday tasks. This leads to lack of independence to the user. Location tracking becomes the most difficult and important task when it comes to the case of blind swimmers. Visually impaired swimmers find it difficult to keep track of their position while swimming and even fail to find their way back to their final destination. Currently existing technologies make use of a third party to help these blind swimmers to avoid such difficulties while swimming. But this affects the independence and autonomy of a swimmer and he/she often finds it uncomfortable. This paper proposes a device that could support the blind swimmer without the help of a third party. The system aims at helping and assisting the blind swimmers. The system is designed in such a way that it consists of a Smartphone (android application), and a storage device which is connected through a Wi-Fi network to the smartphone application. The smartphone computes the location of the swimmer and also monitors the deviation of the swimmer, this is achieved by means of an android application that is developed inside it. The data collected is transmitted to the storage device (PC, or microcontroller) by means of internet connectivity. The distance calculation, and feedback through voice out will be given from this storage device to the swimmer.