Design of Smart Cane with integrated camera module for visually impaired people

In the world, millions of visually impaired or blind people are living. They are always dependent on other people or trained pets to move through an unknown environment. A typical walking stick cannot meet the safety monitoring and guidance requirement of blind people. This paper focuses on designing and developing a smart cane capable of sensing and signaling the environmental features around visually impaired people. The proposed smart cane has two ultrasonic sensors for measuring the distance between the smart cane to the stationary and hanging objects found to be an obstacle. Alert signal is provided by the actuator when the obstacle is falling inside a threshold level of 2 meters. The design integrates a camera module ESP-32 to capture the moving object/people's image in addition to the obstacle detection. The camera module gets enable signal from the PIR sensor to capture the image of the moving object/person and save processor time. It also provides information about the situation around the blind person and their relatives in case of an emergency. It provides the implementation cost and power requirement of the smart cane to develop a camera-enabled stick.