NFC Label Tagging Smartphone Application for the Blind and Visually Impaired in IoT

Abstract

This paper details a mobile labelling application for visually impaired and blind user to help them identify an object’s character in IoT. Visually impaired and blind people recognize items through their sense of touch. However, it is not very easy for them to know the object’s character, for example, the colour of clothes. NFC technology was used to develop this project, the main reason for using NFC is because it requires the least effort to scan and automatically generates information without needing to open any third-party application. Problems arise from the existing applications which are implemented with barcode and QR code, these codes are only convenient for sighted people. If we consider the perspective of the visually impaired or blind people, they need to spend more time searching for the location of the code blindly. Moreover, the existing applications only generate output if the scanner successfully captures the code in full size. Besides that, the lack of labelling feature is another problem of the existing system, which is unable to identify an object’s character which is also crucial for the visually impaired or blind users. Research testing of the usability of the mobile application was tested by 30 people, classified as sighted blindfolded participants and short-sighted users without glasses. The results show that NFC works in the simplest way and requires the least effort during the scanning process, and it is suitable for blind or visually impaired and also sighted user. NFC-enabled Smartphones will generate output when detecting any NFC tags in a range of 3 cm. Having good accessibility and usability of application not only bring benefits to sighted people, but it also helps the visually impaired and blind users enjoy this benefit.