Attention Makers

CATEGORY: OTHER

Multifunctional Device for Blind People

MAKERS: Tasmiya Sheikh

Overview: Millions of people around the world are estimated to be visually impaired, about 90% of which live in low income settings. Performing daily routine activities such as moving around places, detecting obstacles and identifying various objects has always been a serious problem for them. Goals and Objective: Keeping such problems in consideration, I am designing a low cost, portable, wearable and reliable hardware along with the efficient software. This wearable jacket will help visually impaired people in such a way that they will move easily from one place to another by avoiding any obstacle in their way, that too without the need of help from other people. They will also be able to detect/recognize various objects commonly present around them. This will aid them in performing their daily chores easily, independently and more efficiently in an affordable manner. Technical Specifications: Following are the equipment required in this project: 1). Raspberry-Pi 2 kit (model B V1.1) 2). Arduino Uno board 3). Ultra sonic HC-SR04 sensors 4). Raspberry-Pi camera module 5). Keypad 6). Head phones/ Speakers 7). Power Bank Design Specifications: My project basically is an integration of both Digital Image Processing and embedded Sensors and it will be in the form of a wearable jacket. This jacket will be easy to wear and it will have all the equipment mounted in it. My device will consist of multiple functions which include: 1). Obstacle detection using Sensors In this part an array of sensors are mounted on the front side of the jacket. I am placing 5 sensors in a vertical line facing different angles so that they cover more area to detect any obstacle. When the blind person will be walking, the sensors will detect any obstacle coming in the way. The output of these sensor go to the Arduino board which detects the changes and sends the result to the Raspberry Pi kit which gives the output to the user in the form of audio signal ?Stop? through the headphones/speakers. 2). Face Detection using Image processing: In this module when the user will enter some place e.g. a room, he/she will press a specified button on the keypad mounted on the jacket. This will call a function in which face detection algorithm is performed on the image taken by the camera that is place at the front side of the jacket. That function will then give an output in the form of audio signal and tell the user that how many people are there in this room. 3). Image to Speech Output using Image processing: In this part the blind person will place the image (in which some text is written) in front of the mounted camera and press a specified button on the keypad. This will call a function in which image processing is performed to convert it into text. This text will be sent in another function autonomously and it will convert this text into audio signal and give the output to the user via headphones. In this way blind people will be able to ?hear? written things rather than ?read?. 4). Currency Detection using image processing: In this part the user will place paper currency in front of the mounted camera and press a specified button. This will call a function and perform given algorithm to detect the amount of that currency. 5). Other ideas: Up till now I have been working on the above mentioned modules and my further ideas include face recognition, door/windows identification and health sensors integration in the device.

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