Smart Walk: A Smart Stick for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

It is estimated that globally, 285 million people in the world are visually impaired, while 39 million are completely blind. Visual impairment may cause difficulties for people to do their daily activities. There is a need for innovative, ambient, or active assisted living (IAAL) solution(s) to be designed, developed, and deployed for the visually impaired individuals. This paper presents a design of a smart stick for visually impaired individuals as an IAAL solution. The smart stick comprises ultrasonic sensors to detect objects and obstacles, a camera to capture the objects, a GPS module for location update and navigation, and a Raspberry Pi 3B+ which acts as a central unit for the whole system. The smart stick was tested in different environments and backgrounds. The image classification and object detection accuracy of the smart stick system was within the range of 59 per cent to 89 per cent (minimum and maximum range). The smart stick helped the visually impaired individuals to manage walking around their environment. The proposed system will improve the life of visually impaired people since it managed to accurately identify and detect objects with a 89 per cent accuracy level at a one meter distance.