Smart Glasses For Visually Impaired

SUMMARY: Lack of visual ability has been an area of concern since ages. As time progressed, researchers pioneered and so the practices advanced with the era of industrial revolution, trivial solutions came out in practices that exploited technologies to overcome necessities

Project Title

Smart Glasses For Visually Impaired

Project Area of Specialization

Wearables and Implantable

Project Summary

SUMMARY:

Lack of visual ability has been an area of concern since ages. As time progressed, researchers pioneered and so the practices advanced with the era of industrial revolution, trivial solutions came out in practices that exploited technologies to overcome necessities of life. The solutions were always targeted to a cost effective and handy solutions that can be easily incorporated in day to day life.

The idea behind our project is to develop ergonomic and powerful smart wearable that will act as a personal assistance for the visually impaired. The device will have an embedded camera attached with a microprocessor which will capture images that comes within its vicinity. The image could be of any obstacle, book, newspaper, etc. After the image is captured, image will be processed, and the text produced accordingly will be converted to speech for the person using it. It will not only be able to detect text found on books, newspapers and so on, but will also help the blind to detect obstacles and locate items all through a single wearable device.

Project Objectives

OBJECTIVE:

The challenges faced by the visually impaired people in reading texts and doing basic work in their day-to-day life are often not well understood. Their life always depends upon their caregivers and can be quite difficult for them alone. The increasing number of people with disabilities in the world attracts the concern of researchers to invent various technologies, hoping that these technologies can assist the disabled people in carrying out their tasks in everyday life like normal people. Being blind can have negative effects on learning and social interaction. It can affect the natural development of academic ability, social life and profession.

To help improve the quality of life of people with low or no vision, a personal assistance is very necessary. The device we are working on serves as a personal aid keeping in mind the conventional feasibility and handiness for carriage as well as serving the purpose of utilizing the device for academic and daily use. Furthermore, in future these glasses can be easily modified for tracking of blind person by using built in Gps function. Similarly, we can interface our device with different mobile applications making our device modular.

After all our main objective is to have an impact on society in different ways such as:

• Help improve quality of life
• Help visually impaired to contribute to the society
• Collective economic/intellectual growth of society

Project Implementation Method

IMPLEMENTATION:

In the implementation phase, the main idea as stated earlier is to develop opensource smart glasses for visually impaired. The basic implementation of the project is as follows:

The device will be powered up using a rechargeable battery attached onto the glasses. Soon after the device is powered on, the embedded camera with a processor will take an image of the object that comes within its vicinity, for example a book, any obstacle, etc. After capturing the image, the image will be processed to remove noise and unwanted part from the image. The clean and processed image would be transferred to an Optical Character Recognition and Object Detection engine which will detect any kind of text or object in the image. After this process, the text would be converted to sound for the user to listen through a Bluetooth earphone. Bluetooth earphone are not only easy to carry but are also useful when it comes to connecting our device to different other devices (without much input ports) in future.

Benefits of the Project

BENEFITS:

According to a research conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018, there are around 1.3 Billion people in the world who suffer from visual impairment out of which 36 million are completely blind. In Pakistan only, there are around 2.2 million blind people. With the exponential growth in population, the number of blind people is also increasing. It has a great economic impact, especially on developing countries like Pakistan as these people are unable to contribute to the economic growth. Our aim is to make a device that will help improve quality of life of the visually impaired people and assist them inn living a life similar to a normal person which will lead to his personal growth and in turn to the collective economic growth of developing countries like Pakistan. Therefore, visually impaired people will then be able to contribute to the society and will not feel left out.

Talking about practical life, these glasses can be used as a personal aid by the visually impaired as these are easy to carry and use which is the priority for every human being especially taking into consideration the disabled people.

There are different products made for blind and disabled people in the past (Smart Canes, tap tap application and so on), but these products can cause difficulty when you consider making them part of your daily use. However, these smart glasses will never be an extra thing to carry. Wearing it all day will be as normal as usual and by just pressing a button they can utilize what it offers.

In short, the main advantages of this product are:

• It has a modular design
• High percentage accuracy
• Easy to use and carry
• Cost effective

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

FINAL DELIVERABLE:

An open source smart glasses for visually impaired people is what we are aim for.

As far as the reading part is concerned,

The main idea is to read an image taken through the camera module, apply image processing algorithms on it for picture correction. Then the processed image is converted to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR-engine). Finally, the text is converted to speech using text to speech algorithms and read out using earphones with Bluetooth connectivity.

This is done by integrating camera module and earphones (Speech Output) to Raspberry Pi. Also, two other software called Tesseract and TTS engine (Text to Speech synthesizer) are installed to the Raspbian operating system. Multiple languages can be used by accessing engine modes of Tesseract software, but our proposed prototype is particularly designed for English language and printed text. These smart glasses will help blind people read normal text found in books, magazines, newspapers and articles.

Features of the reading module:

• Total weight = 40g
• 3D printed
• Material used is polylactic acid (PLA) which is a bioplastic
• Camera housing on one side and battery housing on the other
• Attachable to any frame
• Ventilation points for cooling
• Bluetooth earphones

Apart from this the power source of the device is Lipo battery.

Features:

• Model = 1S
• Weight = 18g
• Capacity = 1000 mAh
• Charging and discharging circuit
• Smart power circuitry to disconnect the battery in case of overcharge

Features of navigation module:

• ToF sensor for obstacles
• IR sensor that feeds range back to processor
• Range = 5m
• Operating conditions = 5V, 10mA
• Camera = 8mp Sony imx219 sensor based for pi v2.1

Cost of parts:

• Raspberry pi zero W = Rs 3000
• Camera module = Rs 1500
• Battery = Rs 900
• ToF sensor = Rs 1500
• SanDisk micro SD memory card 16 gb = Rs 870
• Raspberry pi addon board = Rs 750
• Accessories = Rs 500
• Total estimated cost = Rs 10,000

The deliverables include:

• Reading printed text in English (Books, Newspapers, Magazines)
• Sensing Range up to 1.5 meters
• White or light coloured page background
• Font size greater than 5
• Object detection within 5m radius

Final Deliverable of the Project

Hardware System

Core Industry

Education

Other Industries

Medical , Health

Core Technology

Wearables and Implantables

Other Technologies

Artificial Intelligence(AI), Internet of Things (IoT)

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Decent Work and Economic Growth

Required Resources

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