Design and implementation of assistive aids for visually impaired people

Abstract

The sense of vision is crucial for humans to comprehend and navigate the world around them. However, approximately 2.2 billion people, as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), experience some form of vision impairment, making tasks like independent navigation, object recognition, and orientation in unfamiliar environments challenging. The prevalence of blindness is on the rise due to the aging population. To address these challenges, assistive aids are vital in facilitating the independent living of visually impaired individuals. newlineThis proposed research aims to overcome various problems faced by the visually impaired by introducing two innovative solutions: NavCane and PocketMed. NavCane assists visually impaired individuals in navigating both indoor and outdoor environments, identifying obstacles, staircases, and wet floors. PocketMed, on the other hand, focuses on managing medication regimes for visually impaired people. This includes providing information about the medication name, recommended consumption schedule, dosage, expiration date, and duration of use. Furthermore, the SmartMedBox is designed to help visually impaired individuals locate their medicine boxes through sound alerts, facilitating quick identification in enclosed spaces. To support banknote classification research, a comprehensive dataset containing both clean and spoilt banknotes has been created and published on IEEEdataport and Mendley Data, which can serve as a valuable resource for other researchers in this field