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Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually-Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions
Abstract and Figures
The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that there are 285 million visually-impaired people worldwide. Among these individuals, there are 39 million who are totally blind. There have been several systems designed to support visually-impaired people and to improve the quality of their lives. Unfortunately, most of these systems are limited in their capabilities. In this paper, we present a comparative survey of the wearable and portable assistive devices for visually-impaired people in order to show the progress in assistive technology for this group of people. Thus, the contribution of this literature survey is to discuss in detail the most significant devices that are presented in the literature to assist this population and highlight the improvements, advantages, disadvantages, and accuracy. Our aim is to address and present most of the issues of these systems to pave the way for other researchers to design devices that ensure safety and independent mobility to visually-impaired people.
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... The mental functions of visually disabled people are different from normal propels. Various assistive technologies support mental functions involving personal digital assistance (PDA), voice instructions, smart watches and electronic calendars [23]. The general internet accessible mobile phones provide specific user interfaces that support the mental functions of the visually impaired. ...
... An example of an eye substitution device[23] ...
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), visual impairment is one of the most common problems affecting approximately one sixth of the world's population. It was found that 39 million of these sufferers have lost their vision completely and require supervision from other people to do their daily chores. Until today, several methodologies have been built to provide effective solutions to visually challenged people, mainly in terms of navigation. The assistive technologies developed for the visually challenged are generally very popular due to the benefits provided, but these technologies are limited in many aspects. One of the main problems with the technologies is that they are non-adaptable and cannot adjust to the changing needs of the participants. The demands of blind people are constantly growing, and there is no powerful technology that can meet all of these demands at the same time. The major constraints with assistive technologies are cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness. This paper presents a complete review of the assistive technologies introduced in the literature to deal with the navigation problems of blind people. Each and every literature work focuses on the requirements of the blind, and several features are considered accordingly. Thus, the presented review provides a detailed description of the evolution of such assistive technologies and the improvements brought in to satisfy the users. Apart from this, the complexities and limitations associated with the technologies are also unwounded to provide a clear perspective on the current scenario for future developers and researchers. Several constraints associated with different assistive technology are interpreted, and this review ends with the insights drawn from the study along with future scopes.
... Hasil penelitian yakni menunjukkan kemungkinan melakukan skrining penyakit mata yang sangat akurat menggunakan kecerdasan buatan, yang dapat meningkatkan pencegahan kebutaan dan mengurangi beban kerja untuk dokter mata. Selanjutnya Elmannai,dkk [9], meneliti dengan tujuan untuk menangani dan menyajikan sebagian besar masalah sistem ini untuk membuka jalan bagi peneliti lain untuk merancang perangkat yang menjamin keamanan dan mobilitas mandiri untuk orang-orang yang mengalami gangguan penglihatan. ...
The vital organs of humans are enabled to see are the eyes. The eye is a camera that plays an important role in supporting daily human activities. An object can be seen clearly or not depends on the ability of light refraction in the eye. If there are abnormalities or eye diseases, it can interfere with one's vision. Visual disturbances related to light refraction namely myopia, hypermetropy, and astigmatism. Currently, there are several steps to help patients overcome these disorders, such as the use of glasses, medicines, surgery, and the use of certain technological devices. However, to follow the above method, the patient cannot detect early for any visual impairment, and the patient must go directly to the ophthalmologist at the clinic or hospital. This is less efficient if the patient has limited distance, time, up to the cost to consult directly. This research is aimed at making devices measuring myopia (nearsightedness) and hypermetropy (farsightedness) in the eye. The main components used are Raspberry Pi as the main microcontroller to process data, LCD viewer to display the results of measurement information, Android smartphone is used to display letters as a test medium that will be answered by patients so that the Raspberry Pi processes sound data from patients whether the answer is true or false. With this system, it can provide convenience for users in early detection of nearsightedness and farsightedness tests independently, so that information on farsightedness can be known from the results of tests carried out without having to consult a doctor directly. Keywords - devices, gauges, visual disturbance, early detection, smartphones
... Body temperature measurement for visually impaired people requires specialized considerations to ensure accurate and accessible readings. In this regard, the infrared thermometer is proper, which enables convenient body temperature readings without physical contact, promoting hygiene and reducing the risk of cross-contamination [36]. More importantly, auditory feedback is desired, which caters to visually impaired people, converting body temperatures into audio signals and providing voice-guided instructions accordingly. ...
In this work, an assistance system based on the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) framework was designed and implemented to provide convenience for visually impaired people. This system aims to be low-cost and multi-functional with object detection, obstacle distance measurement, and text recognition achieved by wearable smart glasses, heart rate detection, fall detection, body temperature measurement, and humidity-temperature monitoring offered by an intelligent walking stick. The total hardware cost is approximately $66.8, as diverse low-cost sensors and modules are embedded. Meanwhile, a voice assistant is adopted, which helps to convey detection results to users. As for the performance evaluation, the accuracies of object detection and text recognition in the wearable smart glasses experiments are 92.16% and 99.91%, respectively, and the maximum deviation rate compared to the mobile app on obstacle distance measurement is 6.32%. In addition, the intelligent walking stick experiments indicate that the maximum deviation rates compared to the commercial devices on heart rate detection, body temperature measurement, and humidity-temperature monitoring are 3.52%, 0.19%, and 3.13%, respectively, and the fall detection accuracy is 87.33%. Such results demonstrate that the proposed assistance system yields reliable performances similar to commercial devices and is impressive when considering the total cost as a primary concern. Consequently, it satisfies the fundamental requirements of daily life, benefiting the safety and well-being of visually impaired people.
People with visual impairment have increased difficulty in performing activities of daily living, such as walking without bumping into obstacles. Many assistive technologies are used to help with ambulation as one walks forward, such as a white walking cane or a service dog. These have proven to be of tremendous help, but the cane may miss suspended objects not touching the ground, and service dogs are not available to all who need them. Further assistive technologies continue to be developed and tested. In nature, those without visual acuity tend to obtain much information from their environment through the other senses, such as hearing or tactile touch. This study is exploring the mapping of obstacle detection to tactile vibration motors on the skin. Ultrasonic sensors were used to detect obstacles in the forward direction where the user would be walking, and calculate the distance. The distance was mapped to a vibration pattern, with the pattern being more intense for closer obstacles. A prototype was developed and had several tests run. Obstacle detection and distance were useful up to 3 m. The functional field of view was 10° to 30° from centerline, but became more narrow as the distance increased and for harder to detect obstacles. The distance was mapped to 3 different vibration patterns, and human subjects were able to distinguish the patterns in a consistent manner. The prototype shows promise, but more testing and development would be required toward widespread application.
This chapter introduces the conceptualization of an educational task tailored for students who have visual impairments, utilizing audio notification and a voice-responsive interface. The design process employed the activity-centered design (ACD) methodology, which centers around the users and their specific requirements and context. This iterative approach facilitated the creation of a prototype device called “The Surfer Pad,” specifically engineered to aid individuals with visual disabilities in navigating audio-based activities such as audio instructions, audiobooks, and thought-provoking queries. However, further investigation is necessary for future endeavors, including 1) conducting evaluations of The Surfer Pad with people with visual disabilities, and 2) assessing the listening comprehension skills of individuals with visual impairments while fostering critical thinking and the analysis of audio content.
BACKGROUND: In recent years, with ever-improving technology, considerable progress has been made in the approaches available to develop mobility assistive technology systems. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to anticipate the future of assistive technologies of navigation and mobility for people with severe visual disabilities in the next twenty years (2021–2041). METHODS: We conducted a technology foresight exercise by identifying promising technologies and invited over 20,000 researchers worldwide to share their views on the future of assistive technologies for people with visual impairment. The technologies and respondents were identified from specialized journals indexed on Web of Science. RESULTS: Most respondents believe computer vision will be the most important assistive technology group for mobility and navigation for visually impaired people, especially with haptic feedback. They also believe that voice and vibrotactile are the most relevant feedback and that glasses and smartphones will be the most important tools for visual impairment support. CONCLUSIONS: While costs and lack of user training may hamper the development and use of these new technologies, they represent the future of assistive technology for people with visual impairments.
Mobility is one of the most important problems for totally and partially disabled people in daily life. Disabled people need some assistive stick or device to avoid obstacles before an accident. This research work proposes to assist disabled people in their daily routines without human guidance. There are four main sections in this paper. Firstly, in the obstacle detection system, five ultrasonic sensors sense the obstacles in the front side, left side, and right side of the user's way on the ground and another ultrasonic sensor senses the overhanging obstacles near the user's head level. Secondly, in an obstacle avoidance system, the servo steering motor is equipped with the front wheel of the stick's base. The wheel with servo motor will turn easily to the left direction or right direction depending on the detecting or sensing of the ultrasonic sensors. Thirdly, in the voice-guided system, there are six recorded human voice messages in the Myanmar language for disabled users in the author's country, Myanmar.
Sport is one of the best ways to promote the social integration of people affected by physical disability, because it helps them to increase their self-esteem by facing difficulties and overcoming their disabilities. Nowadays, a large number of sports can be easily played by visually impaired and blind athletes without any special supports, but, there are some disciplines that require the presence of a sighted guide. In this work, the attention will be focused on marathons, during which athletes with visual disorders have to be linked to the sighted guide by means of a non-stretchable elbow tether, with an evident reduction of their performance and autonomy. In this context, this paper presents a fixed electromagnetic infrastructure to equip a standard running racetrack in order to help a blind athlete to safely run without the presence of a sighted guide. The athlete runs inside an invisible hallway, just wearing a light and a comfortable sensor unit. The patented system has been homemade, designed, realized and finally tested by a blind Paralympic marathon champion with encouraging results and interesting suggestions for technical improvements. In this paper (Part I), the transmitting unit, whose main task is to generate the two magnetic fields that delimit the safe hallway, is presented and discussed.
This paper presents the development of a portable system with the aim of allowing blind people to detect and recognize Euro banknotes. The developed device is based on a Raspberry Pi electronic instrument and a Raspberry Pi camera, Pi NoIR (No Infrared filter) dotted with additional infrared light, which is embedded into a pair of sunglasses that permit blind and visually impaired people to independently handle Euro banknotes, especially when receiving their cash back when shopping. The banknote detection is based on the modified Viola and Jones algorithms, while the banknote value recognition relies on the Speed Up Robust Features (SURF) technique. The accuracies of banknote detection and banknote value recognition are 84% and 97.5%, respectively.
In the most recent report published by theWorld Health Organization concerning people with visual disabilities it is highlighted that by the year 2020, worldwide, the number of completely blind people will reach 75 million, while the number of visually impaired (VI) people will rise to 250 million. Within this context, the development of dedicated electronic travel aid (ETA) systems, able to increase the safe displacement of VI people in indoor/outdoor spaces, while providing additional cognition of the environment becomes of outmost importance. This paper introduces a novel wearable assistive device designed to facilitate the autonomous navigation of blind and VI people in highly dynamic urban scenes. The system exploits two independent sources of information: ultrasonic sensors and the video camera embedded in a regular smartphone. The underlying methodology exploits computer vision and machine learning techniques and makes it possible to identify accurately both static and highly dynamic objects existent in a scene, regardless on their location, size or shape. In addition, the proposed system is able to acquire information about the environment, semantically interpret it and alert users about possible dangerous situations through acoustic feedback. To determine the performance of the proposed methodology we have performed an extensive objective and subjective experimental evaluation with the help of 21 VI subjects from two blind associations. The users pointed out that our prototype is highly helpful in increasing the mobility, while being friendly and easy to learn.
In this paper, we introduce a real-time face recognition (and announcement) system targeted at aiding the blind and low-vision people. The system uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor as a wearable device, performs face detection, and uses temporal coherence along with a simple biometric procedure to generate a sound associated with the identified person, virtualized at his/her estimated 3-D location. Our approach uses a variation of the K-nearest neighbors algorithm over histogram of oriented gradient descriptors dimensionally reduced by principal component analysis. The results show that our approach, on average, outperforms traditional face recognition methods while requiring much less computational resources (memory, processing power, and battery life) when compared with existing techniques in the literature, deeming it suitable for the wearable hardware constraints. We also show the performance of the system in the dark, using depth-only information acquired with Kinect’s infrared camera. The validation uses a new dataset available for download, with 600 videos of 30 people, containing variation of illumination, background, and movement patterns. Experiments with existing datasets in the literature are also considered. Finally, we conducted user experience evaluations on both blindfolded and visually impaired users, showing encouraging results.
Equal access to services and public places is now required by law in many countries. In the case of the visually impaired, it is often the use of assistive technology that facilitates their full participation in many societal activities ranging from meetings and entertainment to the more personal activities of reading books or making music. In this volume, the engineering techniques and design principles used in many solutions for vision-impaired and blind people are described and explained.
Features:
• a new comprehensive assistive technology model structures the volume into groups of chapters on vision fundamentals, mobility, communications and access to information, daily living, education and employment, and finally recreational activities;
• contributions by international authors from the diverse engineering and scientific disciplines needed to describe and develop the necessary assistive technology solutions;
• systematic coverage of the many different types of assistive technology devices, applications and solutions used by visually impaired and blind people;
• chapters open with learning objectives and close with sets of test questions and details of practical projects that can be used for student investigative work and self-study.
Assistive Technology for Vision-impaired and Blind People is an excellent self-study and reference textbook for assistive technology and rehabilitation engineering students and professionals. The comprehensive presentation also allows engineers and health professionals to update their knowledge of recent assistive technology developments for people with sight impairment and loss.
We propose an improved version of a wearable lightweight device to support visually impaired people during their everyday lives by facilitating autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance. The system deploys two retina-inspired Dynamic Vision Sensors for visual information gathering. These sensors are characterized by very low power consumption, low latency and drastically reduced data rate in comparison with regular CMOS/ CCD cameras which makes them well suited for real-time mobile applications. Event-based algorithms operating on the visual data stream extract depth information in real-time which is translated into the acoustic domain. Spatial auditory signals are simulated at the computed origin of visual events in the real world. These sounds are modulated according to the position in the field of view which the user can change by moving their head. Here, different tests with eleven subjects are conducted to evaluate the performance of the system. These tests show that the modulation helps to improve object localization performance significantly in comparison to prior experiments. Further trials estimate the visual acuity a user of the device would have using the Landolt C test. The low power consumption of all integrated components in a final system will allow for a long lasting battery life of a small portable device, which might ultimately combine perceived visual information and environmental knowledge to provide a higher quality of life for the visually impaired.
Proposed is a prototype of a wearable mobility device which aims to assist the blind with navigation and object avoidance via auditory-vision-substitution. The described system uses two dynamic vision sensors and event-based information processing techniques to extract depth information. The 3D visual input is then processed using three different strategies, and converted to a 3D output sound using an individualized head-related transfer function. The performance of the device with different processing strategies is evaluated via initial tests with ten subjects. The outcome of these tests demonstrate promising performance of the system after only very short training times of a few minutes due to the minimal encoding of outputs from the vision sensors which are translated into simple sound patterns easily interpretable for the user. The envisioned system will allow for efficient real-time algorithms on a hands-free and lightweight device with exceptional battery life-time.
One of the most debilitating human conditions is blindness or severe visual impairment. Many assistive devices have been developed during the past decades to ameliorate the two primary challenges associated with this disability: access to reading material and independent mobility. This article presents an overview of the consequences of this impairment and examines the various technological aids currently available and under development to address these problems. This article discusses the consequences of blindness and severe visual impairment; assistive technology that facilitates access to written information; assistive devices that enhance independence in the activities of daily living; and mobility and navigational aids that enable persons who are blind or severe visual impaired to achieve safer and more independent travel. The article concludes with a prospective look at assistive technology likely to become available in the not too distant future.
Keywords:
electronic devices;
braille;
mobility aids;
wayfinding;
laser cane;
navigational guide