Wearable Navigation and Assistive System for Visually Impaired

According to the research carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO), it was found that there at least 285 million people across the globe who are visually-impaired. A significantly high proportion of them (around 39 million) are totally blind. This figure highlights the criticality of the problem. In the past, there have been several systems that were aimed and designed to support visually-impaired people and to improve the quality of their lives. Unfortunately, most of them were either expensive or lacked robust design. The simplest and the most affordable navigations tools available to them are trained dogs and the white canes. Although these tools are very popular, they cannot provide the blind with all information and features for safe mobility, which are available to normal people. The solution to this is to make any obstacles on the road easy to identify so that even the smallest unevenness on the path like a protrusion or a depression can be identified. In this paper, we present a cost effective and robust solution by the means of wearable and portable assistive devices for visually-impaired people. We have used two main components, namely ultrasonic sensor Arduino Nano micro controller. They are used in unison gyroscope which forms a critical element of the system along with other modules to create a prototype of an obstacle detection system. The advantages and disadvantages of such a system as well as the functionalities which could be improved with the addition of newer modules are all described here.