Location Enabled Smart Stick for Visually Impaired People

The ultimate goal of our application is to serve visually impaired and elderly people. Blind people have been using a simple white foldable stick as an aid for their daily activities since many years. The idea in this project is to develop an intelligent solution. The project has two pha

Project Title

Location Enabled Smart Stick for Visually Impaired People

Project Area of Specialization

Internet of Things

Project Summary

The ultimate goal of our application is to serve visually impaired and elderly people. Blind
people have been using a simple white foldable stick as an aid for their daily activities since
many years. The idea in this project is to develop an intelligent solution. The project has two
phases. In first phase, the Arduino based smart stick will be designed. The second phase is to
design an android application that link with the smart stick and provides notification, buzzers,
tracking and other features that will help the elderly and blind people. 

Project Objectives

An Electronic Travel Aid is a form of Assistive technology for enhancing mobility of blind person.
The research problem of designing a better ETA is tough one. Blind people find travelling
difficult because they cannot determine where obstacles are. This process is also called as
“Spatial Sensing?. There are various problems with existing system. First, the rangefinder
technology is unreliable in detecting steps. Second, Blind people find various sound pitches and
vibrations difficult to understand. Third, these systems are quite expensive and since blind
person have to depend financially on someone, they don?t feel worth to invest so much. Hence,
the solution must be intelligent and cheap. Finally, to the best of our knowledge, there is no
app that gives tracking information of blind/elderly people to their loved ones. This project aims to design smart stick for blind people and elderly people using Arduino and
android. To achieve the aim, following are the objectives of our proposed project.
1. To study the existing methods and tools designed for visually impaired persons
2. To design the smart stick using sensors that must be lightweight and cheap.
3. To design the android application that link with sensors and helps the person to identify
obstacles through voice based notification.
4. Enabling relatives/love ones of the visually impaired and elderly persons to track their
moments at home.

Project Implementation Method

This project includes hardware and software implementation. To design hardware module,
Arduino and sensors are used. For tracking, GPS module will be use. This smart stick will link
with software. For software implementation android studio will be utilized. The application has
features for example notification, buzzer in case of obstacle. Moreover, the tracking and
navigation system will be design based on voice recognition. The figure 1 shows the proposed
methodology.

Benefits of the Project

According to World health organization (WHO) globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a vision
impairment or blindness . Many solutions are provided to aid blind people and including
elderly people also. In , researcher proposed Smart Blind Stick, an IoT-based project that has
sensors using which the distance of any obstacle can be measured and provides output in the
form of buzzers. RF transmitter and receiver will be used to locate the stick. In an Intelligent
walking Stick for the Blind was proposed using infrared sensors, RFID technology, and android
devices.  Smart Electronic Stick for Visually Impaired. Their proposed
system is a theoretical model and a system concept to provide a smart electronic aid for blind
people. The study in  proposed the sensor assisted stick for the blind people. The main
objective of this design is to develop an application for blind people to detect the objects in
various directions, detecting pits and manholes on the ground to make free to walk.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

if the construction architecture followed accuretly, blind people will be able to move from one place to other easily without people's help which will increase autonomy for blind people. the developed smart stick which is incorporated with multiple sensors will help in navigating the way while walking and keep alarming person if any sign of danger is detected. GPS can be linked with voice stick for navigation so that person can know his current position and distance from destination which will be informed to users through voice instructions.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

IT

Other Industries

Core Technology

Internet of Things (IoT)

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com