Smart Assisting Visually Impaired Stick (SAVIS)

Abstract

The blind stick is one of the tools or equipment that been daily bring along to navigate and detect obstacle for blind or visually impaired people. This blind stick has its limitation that is can detect the ground obstacles by hitting and let the people to move either left or right direction. Besides that, blind people have also been faced some awkward situations such as hitting walker's leg by blind stick, injury by hitting the obstacles. Thus, this research project is to help them to overcome such awkward situations of using the blind stick. The blind stick designed in this project use Raspberry Pi 3 B+ module as a main processor to compute the task activity. This blind stick will be implement with a night vision camera, which captures the image of the obstacle. After that image will be processed using digital image processing software to detect the edges. Then, system sends the PWM signal to motor wheel, which control the direction of the stick to avoid hitting obstacle. A GPS module is used to help blind people navigate in proper direction. Telegram app has been used for automatic sending the real-time GPS location and picture to a caretaker by pressing a button on the stick. Caretaker check the location of the bind people whether they moved away from the current location by sending a text message to the system in the stick. Apart from that, object identifying function also been implement into this project.