This paper reports on a study that helps visually-impaired people to walk more confidently. The study hypothesizes that a smart cane that alerts visually-impaired people over obstacles in front could help them in walking with less accident. The aim of the paper is to address the development work of a cane that could communicate with the users through voice alert and vibration, which is named Smart Cane. T he development work involves coding and physical installation. A series of tests have been carried out on the smart cane and the results are discussed. This study found that the Smart Cane functions well as intended, in alerting users about the obstacles in front
The increasing number of people with disabilities in Malaysia attracts the concern of researchers to invent various technologies, hoping that these technologies can assist the disabled people in carrying out their tasks in everyday life like normal people [1]. The increasing trend of people with disabilities has been reported by Country Report Malaysia, the 7 th ASEAN and Japan High Level Officials Meeting on Caring Societies in 2009. As stated in the report, in 2008, there were only 30,522 children with disabilities detected. The amount increased to 13.7% in 2009 where 35,368 people with disabilities were registered with the Department of Social Welfare [2]. Therefore, technologies are considered the best solution to assist this community to perform tasks as the normal people.
The objective of the paper is to discuss the development work of a cane that could communicate with the users through voice alert and vibration, which is named Smart Cane which involves coding and physical installation.
This paper is organized as follows; section 2 describes some related work. Methodology is explained in section 3. Results presented in section 4 and the paper is concluded in section 5.
This section describes appropriate related works on the development of smart canes intended for visually-impaired people.
According to [1], technology can help in reducing many barriers that people with disabilities face. T hese kinds of technologies are referred to as assistive technology (AT).
There are many types of disabilities, including physical disabilities, hearing-impaired, and visually-impaired. A T has been utilized in assisting them [4,5,6,9]. H owever, developing an AT is expensive [3], making their selling price high.
According to Mazo and Rodriguez [8] the blind Cane is one of the assisting tools for the visually-impaired and it is really important. According to Herman [3], one of the main problems of the visually-impaired, is that most of these people have lost their physical integrity. Al so, they do not have confidence in themselves. This statement has been proven by Bouvrie [7], in which an experiment name “Project Prakash” has been carried out. It was intended at testing the visually-impaired to utilize their brain to identify set of objects. According to Chang and Song [12], this can also be applied to different situation. W hen the visually-impaired walk into a new environment, they will find it difficult to memorize the locations of the object or obstacles. T hese examples demonstrate the difficulties of visually-impaired people.
The GuideCane [9] is designed to help the visuallyimpaired users navigate safely and quickly among obstacles and other hazards. GuideCane is used like the widely used white cane, where the user holds the GuideCane in front of the user while walking. The GuideCane is considerably heavier than the white cane, because it uses a s ervo motor. The wheels are equipped with encoders to determine the relative motion. The servo motor, controlled by the built-in computer, can steer the wheels left and right relative to the cane. To detect obstacles, the GuideCane is equipped with ten ultrasonic sensors. A mini joystick located at the handle allows the user to specify a desired direction of motion. GuideCane is far heavier than the ordinary white cane and also it is hard to keep because it cannot be folded.
Smart Cane is one invention which was originally the creation of a common blind cane but it is equipped with a sensor system. This invention resembles GuideCane where this invention has a number of ultrasonic sensors and servo motors. This invention is designed with the aim at helping the blind in navigating. Ultrasonic sensors need to detect and avoid obstacles or objects located in front of the user. Meanwhile the fuzzy controller is required to determine the instructions that will be executed for example to turn right, left or stop. Like GuideCane, this invention also has a control button on the handle, and the button has four different directions. This invention has the same weaknesses as the GuideCane where there will be a problem to save space or to place the smart cane. Besides that, cost is also a weakness in this project as it uses ultrasonic sensors and a number of servo motors. If the cost is too high, users are not able to afford for it because the average income of the visually-impaired people is relatively small.
Smart Cane has been designed by students from Central Michigan University where this invention uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). RFID is used to detect objects or obstacles in front of the user and detects the RFID tag that has been placed in several areas to navigate the users. This invention is just like a normal stick but is equipped with a bag, worn by the user. The bag supplies electricity power to the invention and informs the user through speakers inside the bag. For users who do not have the ability to hear, there are special gloves that will vib
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