Virtual walking stick: Mobile application to assist visually impaired people to walking safely

Abstract

People affected by temporary visual limitations or early permanent limitations have the challenge of adapting the way to perform their daily tasks. In particular, the activity of walking without support of others not only requires extensive adaptation but also can expose individuals to the risk. For instance, if an object is not identified during the walk, serious accidents may happen. Therefore, assist blind people to walk independently and safely is an important challenge for computational area. With the popularity of smartphones, cameras and new sensors are available at affordable prices and can be used to develop software to help visually impaired people to walk more independently and safely. This paper presents the development of a mobile application to help visually impaired people to walk independently, using the smartphone's camera to alert them about obstacles on the way. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.