Electronic Guidance Cane for Users Having Partial Vision Loss Disability

Abstract

Vision is, no doubt, one of the most important and precious gifts to humans; however, there exists a fraction of visually impaired ones who cannot see properly. These visually impaired disabled people face many challenges in their lives - like performing routine activities, e.g., shopping and walking. Additionally, they also need to travel to known and unknown places for different necessities, and hence, they require an attendant. Most of the time, affording an attendant is not easier and inexpensive, especially when almost 2.5% of the population of Pakistan is visually impaired. There exist some ways of helping these physically impaired people, for example, devices with a navigation system with speech output; however, these are either less accurate, costly, or heavier. Additionally, none of them have shown perfect results in both indoor and outdoor activities. Additionally, the problems become even more severe when the subject/the people are partially deaf as well. In this paper, we present a proof of concept of an embedded prototype which not only navigates but also detects the hurdles and gives alerts - using speech alarm output and/or vibration for the partially deaf - along the way. The designed embedded system includes a cane, a microcontroller, Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Global Positioning System (GPS) module, Arduino, a speech output module speaker, Light-Dependent Resistor (LDR), and ultrasonic sensors for hurdle detection with voice and vibrational feedback. Using our developed system, physically impaired people can reach their destination safely and independently.