Research and development of WEarable walKing mate system

A wearable travel aid to guide visually impaired without special infrastructures has been developed. We call this system WEarable walKing mate system (WEK). The WEK has three functions that 1) Create courses data, 2) Guide a visually impaired to the destinations, and 3) Warm the dangerous places. This paper described the estimation method of travel distance using Optical Flow in the WEK, which is effective for various ways of walking. The experimental results in an indoor environment show the each error of estimated travel distance is less than at previous method to three kinds of how, a shuffle, a natural walking, and a march. There are shown that the WEK is efficient for guiding the visually impaired to the destinations.