Wearable device in the form of glasses to assist the visually impaired in detecting obstacles
Abstract
Data from the World Health Organization show that all over the world, 39 million people are blind and 246 million have low vision. In Brazil, according to research from the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, half a million people are blind. In this context, social inclusion and development of accessibility tools help these people with mobility problems. However, there are difficulties in the identification of obstacles localized above the waist-level, like walls, columns, street lamps, tree branches, and others. These obstacles aren't easily identified by common canes used by visually impaired people and, as a result, accidents are very common. Therefore, we present a prototype version of a wearable device in the form of glasses that detects obstacles localized above the waist-level, with the help of an infrared sensor, a position sensor to prevent the generation of false positives or negatives, and a Kalman filter to smooth noise. Furthermore, we have an Android app available and we made experiments in both the lab and usability tests. Finally, the proposed technology reached 93% sensibility and 95% specificity.
