Visually Impaired Assistive System

Abstract

This paper presents visually impaired assistive system (VIAS) which focuses on independent mobility of visually impaired or blind people who suffer in an unknown environment without any manual assistance. This system employs Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to achieve an objective of identifying certain paths for the user navigation as well as provide certain features such as object recognition, log records of all users' tag access, emergency button and user track information. This proposed system on the user side include a mobile RFID reader module with an integrated microcontroller, zigbee transceiver for transmitting the tag's information and TTS for playing information to the user and on the server side zigbee transceiver for wireless communication. In path identification technique, RFID passive tag network is employed on the path and for object recognition required tools and other objects in the house or building will be embedded with passive RFID tags. A text data unique to each object and path location, resides on the server. The reader reads the tags and transmits the data wirelessly to the server PC which in turn scans for the received Tag ID in the database and respond to the user with its related text data which is played at the user side by converting it from text to speech with the help of TTS module. The feasibility and reliability of the developed system is tested by deploying the proposed system at Blind school of girls at Pune, India. As an overall this system will help visually impaired person to gain the feelings of visualization. General Terms Blind navigation system, visually impaired user navigation and object recognition system.