Assistive Smart Cane for Blind

Abstract

Blindness and visual impairment has affected over 276 million blind people globally and 1.14 million in Pakistan alone. As a result of not having proper sight, people suffering from blindness and visual impairment face lots of trouble with their day-to-day tasks. There is a dire need to aid the blind to make them eligible to perform their chores. The project deals with the design of an assistive smart cane for the blind. Smart canes available in the market are way out of the reach of an ordinary person for being quite expensive. The aim of the project is to address the development work of a cane that could communicate with the users through voice alerts and vibratory patterns for obstacle detection and easy navigation. The idea is to keep the device equally usable for both, blind and visually impaired users. Use of Ultrasonic sensor, MaxSonar will be made for obstacle detection. Haptic feedback will be generated using low-cost vibratory motor. A smartphone app will make it easier for the user to navigate without any hassle. For making the cane user-friendly and interactive, it’ll be able to connect to the smartphone app via BLE. The proposed multifunction smart cane will be a hybrid of hardware and software. Major features include affordability, light weight, suitable range, efficient, responsive, and most importantly a standalone MVP.