Ultrasonic Spectacles and Waist-belt for Visually Impaired and Blind Person

Shripad S. Bhatlawande Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Kharagpur, India

Abstract This paper presents an electronic navigation

Jayant Mukhopadhyay and Manjunatha Mahadevappa Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Kharagpur, India other multiple sensors. These systems are quite bulky and involves physical interface with the subject. In recent systems like vOICe, NAVI, SVETA and CASBLIP, images are captured using single or stereo video cameras mounted on a wearable system. Captured images are re-sized, processed further and converted to speech, audio beeps, musical sound or vibrations. In such systems frequency of sound shares some relationship with the orientation of pixels. Some advanced systems use Global Positioning System (GPS) integration with the main system. GPS receiver is useful for understanding the current location of the subject and nearby landmarks. Although many advanced electronic navigation aids are available these days for visually impaired and blind people, very few of them are in use. Therefore user acceptability assessment of such systems is very important. The most influencing parameters in this regard are size, portability, reliability, useful functionalities, simple user interface, training time, system robustness and affordability in terms of cost. Considering all these user expectations and requirements, a tailor made low cost and reliable navigation system is proposed in this paper for visually impaired and blind people. II. DESCRIPTION OF THE SYSTEM An embedded system integrating five ultrasonic sensor pairs, APR9600 audio recording and playback flash memory, earphone with AT89S52 microcontroller. Figure 1 shows the proposed system for visually impaired and blind navigation. In this wearable system, two ultrasonic sensor pairs are mounted on the eye glasses and rest three pairs are mounted on customized waist belt. These three ultrasonic sensor pairs are placed 12 cm apart facing towards front left, center and right direction.

system for visually impaired and blind people (subject). This system understands obstacles around the subject up to 500 cm in front, left and right direction using a network of ultrasonic sensors. It effectively calculates distance of the detected object from the subject and prepares navigation path accordingly avoiding obstacles. It uses speech feedback to aware the subject about the detected obstacle and its distance. This proposed system uses AT89S52 microcontroller based embedded system to process real time data collected using ultrasonic sensor network. Based on direction and distance of detected obstacle, relevant pre-recorded speech message stored in APR9600 flash memory is invoked. Such speech messages are conveyed to the subject using earphone. Keywords- Electronic Travel Aid; Visual Impairment; Navigation Aid; Mobility; Ultrasonic spectacles; Blind navigation; I. INTRODUCTION According to survey conducted in 2009 by World Health Organization on disability, there are 269 million visually impaired and 45 million blind people worldwide [1]. Ageing populations and lifestyle changes means that chronic blinding conditions such as diabetic retinopathy are projected to rise exponentially. Without effective, major intervention, the number of blind people worldwide has been projected to increase to 76 million by 2020 if current trends continue[2]. There are many traditional and advanced navigational aids are available for visually impaired and blind people. Usage of all these travel aids for detecting obstacles for smooth navigation requires a good training. Presently several electronic travel aids (ETA) are available for visually impaired and blind people. These aids are designed using recent technological developments in automation. Some of these aids are sonic pathfinder [3], Mowat-Sensor [4], Guide-Cane[5], SonicGuide [6], NavBelt [7], vOICE [8], NAVI [9], SVETA [10],CASBLIP [11] and Electronic travel aid [12]. All these systems are either sensor (non-vision) based or vision based. In sensor based systems like sonic pathfinder, Mowat-Sensor, Guide-Cane, Sonic-Guide , NavBelt, ultrasonic or laser devices are used. In such a system, the device receives reflected waves, and produces either an audio (buzzer beep) or vibration in response to detected obstacles. Recent navigation systems use digital video cameras as vision sensor along with

Figure 1: Ultrasonic spectacles and waist belt system for visually impaired and blind person

978-1-4673-0816-8/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE