Wearable Walking Aid System to Assist Visually Impaired Persons to Navigate Sidewalks

Sidewalks are one of the busiest and noisiest places people navigate on a daily basis. This poses a challenge especially for visually impaired persons, who lack the crucial sense of sight. Currently implemented mass measures to aid them are bumps and color indicators on sidewalks and also the walking sticks that such persons are dependent on to avoid collisions with other pedestrians and obstacles. We propose a system which incorporates a wearable device in the form of a glove and an Android device to assist visually impaired persons and make it easier for them to navigate safely. The Android device and the glove sync together via Bluetooth connection, the vibration actuators in the glove provide haptic feedback to the user corresponding to instructions from the paired device. Our Android application captures a live video of the world in front of the user using the camera of the device and performs a sequence of computer vision tasks in real-time to inform the user via haptic feedback, about the direction of oncoming persons in their surroundings, possible chances of collision with these persons, position and state of the traffic lights, presence of stop signs and other road signs. The performance of the solution has been tested by conducting real life deployment tests on 15 blindfolded visually abled subjects and has yielded an accuracy of 84.45% in aiding them.