Development of a Smart Shoe for Blind and Visual Impaired People

Providing adequate clinical and technical aid to blinds and visually impaired persons can be very challenging as it put financial strain on families due to the medical examination, treatment, surgical procedures and assistive devices expenses. The specialists to the mentioned individuals' ratio is low and exposure to ophthalmologists is limited. Either requirement of smartphone applications with need of internet connection or only direction oriented solutions but unable to avoid obstacles are the issues in existing market solutions. This paper proposes a novel technology of smart assistant aid for blind and visually impaired people (SSVIP) by developing a smart shoe prototype with sensors to detect obstacles, wet surfaces and ground vibrations, providing real-time feedback to the user. If any of these are detected, the controller activates the buzzer and vibration motor, providing both audible alerts based on the detected sensor signal in order to alarm the wearer and tactile feedback respectively. SSVIP is then tested on 20 iterations after configuring and calibrating sensors and getting the optimized 20 units for ultrasonic sensor, 650 threshold for water sensor. Output accuracies of 87%, 80% and 83% for ultrasonic sensor, water sensor and vibration sensor resnectively and resulting overall 83% accuracy was acheived.