Sightless People Research Articles

IoT Based Smart Shoe for Visually Impaired

IoT based Smart shoe system for visually impaired is a system made with the help of ultrasonic sensors, GPS and GSM module paired to an Arduino UNO board. Internet of things is all about making physical objects communicate with other objects or even with humans. Sightless people face great difficulty to travel independently. They must depend on others in many aspects of their life. The Major problem is when they walk on the road. With a stick in hand, they cannot detect every obstacle that comes in their way. The Smart shoe design provides a long-term solution for the blind to walk on roads independently. The smart shoe will help the Blind person to reach his destination independently. It is built using IoT Technology in which the shoe will be embedded with various sensors, Microcontroller, and buzzers. The shoe warns the user by making noise with the buzzer when he/she walks in front of an obstacle. The smart shoe communicates and coordinate with each other to ensure that the user does not collide with any obstacle in his way. Visually Impaired People face issues while travelling outdoors, this paper presents a literary review of overcoming such issues by making wearable sensors by planting them on shoes using IOT (Internet of Things). Use of ultrasonic sensors and buzzer to notify the end- user regarding upcoming obstacles.

IoT based Smart Shoe for Visually Impaired

IoT based Smart shoe system for visually impaired is a system made with the help of ultrasonic sensors, GPS and GSM module paired to an Arduino UNO board. Internet of things is all about making physical objects communicate with other objects or even with humans. Sightless people face great difficulty to travel independently. They must depend on others in many aspects of their life. The Major problem is when they walk on the road. With a stick in hand, they cannot detect every obstacle that comes in their way. The Smart shoe design provides a long-term solution for the blind to walk on roads independently. The smart shoe will help the Blind person to reach his destination independently. It is built using IoT Technology in which the shoe will be embedded with various sensors, Microcontroller, and buzzers. The shoe warns the user by making noise with the buzzer when he/she walks in front of an obstacle. The smart shoe communicates and coordinate with each other to ensure that the user does not collide with any obstacle in his way. Visually Impaired People face issues while travelling outdoors, this paper presents a literary review of overcoming such issues by making wearable sensors by planting them on shoes using IOT (Internet of Things). Use of ultrasonic sensors and buzzer to notify the end-user regarding upcoming obstacles. Keywords: Arduino UNO, IOT, Sensors, Buzzer, GPS and GSM module.

Smart Blind Stick Design and Implementation

Technologies are rapidly evolving, allowing people to live healthier and simpler lives. Sightless people are unable to carry out their everyday activities, such as walking down the street, visiting friends or relatives, or doing some other mundane tasks. As a result, the smart stick is a stick that can assist a person in walking safely without fear of colliding with another person or solid objects is proposed as a solution to this major issue. It is a development of the traditional blind stick as it acts as a companion for the blind when walking by sending audio alerts to the blind via a headphone connected to the phone with obstacles (water/walls/stairs / muddy ground) and also enables him to make a phone call to ask for help. EasyEda software was used for designing and simulating electrical circuits, was used to model the electric circuit. This system functions similarly to a white cane in that it assists blind people in scanning their surroundings for obstacles or orientation marks. This system will be mounted on a white cane with an ultrasonic sensor, and a water sensor to detect changes in the environment. Ultrasonic sensors detect obstacles in front of it using ultrasonic wave reflection, water detection sensors detect whether there is a puddle.

Queer Self-Representation Inside the Museum

Most museums claim to foster the democratisation of their collections through top-down educational programmes. However, it is possible to challenge this perspective and, instead, encourage self-empowerment in lieu of imitation, hosting, and fostering cultural contributions offered by different communities that cultivate independent paths toward creating identities and institutional recognition. Although ‘discrimination’ seems to be a constitutive feature of museums, in that their entire structure is based on exclusion/inclusion processes at multiple levels, their structure offers unlimited possibilities to enact different approaches. If we consider museums as hypertexts that enable continuous re-readings, we can adopt them as generative spaces for critical and innovative practices. Several events that took place at the Modern Art Museum of Bologna (MAMbo) over the past decade show different approaches to tackling discrimination in museums. Each offered a range of reflections and activities concerning specific topics: the audience of sightless people in contemporary art museums (Collezioni mai viste, 2008), women’s art (Autoritratti, 2013 ), and gender representations (Performing Gender, 2015). Each event was developed as a research action project and carried out by groups strongly committed to contemporary art, respectively representing communities of sightless people, women, and LGBTQI+. Framing specificity as a tool for more diverse forms of representation, museums might question their own history, collections, practices and contexts, cooperating with existing communities representing cultural diversity to foster new narratives and enable the creation of new sources for different discourses and histories to be told.

Software para el aprendizaje de operaciones aritméticas a través del ábaco Cranmer para débiles visuales

This article proposes a software development to help the sightless people learning arithmetic operations using the Cranmer abacus. To create this software was considered that the sightless person could not read the screen; for that reason, it was implemented a screen reader and navigation through the scroll and click, so the person can choose menus and options. It was used the prototypes methodology to improve each one of the versions and adapt them to the needs of the users. The user has to have a Cranmer abacus where he will represent numbers and do arithmetic operations, later through the use of a camera, the software will recognize the numeric values represented in the abacus. The first level is to represent numbers, later the software proposes a series of arithmetic operations, that the user has to solve and use the abacus to represent the result; the software checks if the answer is correct or gives orientation with a voice to help the user respond accurately. There are talking calculators, but this software proposes the learning with the abacus because it allows to develop mathematic skill needed for the sightless people.

Navigating Visually Impaired and Sightless People using Auditory Guidelines

Navigating Visually Impaired and Sightless People using Auditory Guidelines

A Hybrid Approach for Identification of Manhole and Staircase to Assist Visually Challenged

Recognition of an object is a bare minimum restraint for an individual in order to sort out or classify the type of the object. This situation becomes a tricky experience with respect to the blind persons; therefore, to assist visually challenged persons, in particular, while recognizing the staircases and manholes, a prototype of mobility recognition is presented using the feature vector identification and sensor computed processor Arduino chips. This prototype provides more sovereignty to the sightless people while walking on the roads and helps to pass through on their own without any backing. This prototype is developed using Arduino kit along with feature detection module and helps the visually challenged in reaching their destinations with ease. A low weight stick is built to facilitate the visually challenged people toward effective recognition of the obstacles. In order to recognize the manholes, the chip is programmed and embedded in the stick that also holds the code for detection of the staircases based on a bivariate Gaussian mixture model; speeded up robust features algorithm is considered for extraction of features. The developed model shows an accuracy of around 90% for manhole detection and 88% for staircase detection.

Blindness in Nuzi Texts

Summary Nine texts issued from the site of Nuzi (modern Yorġan Tepe, Iraq) attest the Akkadian term UB-BU-TU, referring to people, with different spellings and contexts. Various etymological interpretations of the term have been proposed, the most followed being upput.u, “blind (person)”. However, the debate is far from closed, and recent studies have questioned such view (1.). This paper aims at assessing the Nuzi evidence (2.–3.), supporting the traditional interpretation of the term as “blind (person)”, and setting the whole topic in the context of the employment of sightless people as workforce in the Ancient Near East (4.).

A New Framework for Cognitive Mobility of Visually Impaired Users in Using Tactile Device

This paper proposes a novel framework for a better understanding of human cognitive locomotion and its interaction with the new tactile technologies that assist mobility and the acquisition of spatial knowledge in the absence of sight [case of visually impaired people (VIP), seniors, etc.]. Unlike the existing mobility models, the proposed framework encompasses four elements: 1) walking with obstacle avoidance, 2) orientation, 3) spatial awareness, and 4) actual physical displacement, and is based on the concept of the tactile gist, a refreshable (dynamic) egocentric tactile representation of the perceived scene. The relevance of the tactile gist concept for achieving the assistance of human mobility has been evaluated with three basic original spatial experiments (homing with obstacle avoidance, localization of a passage and its size estimation, and navigation in an apartment) using a purposely designed perception-movement platform and a touch stimulating tangible wearable refreshable device. The collected results show that the tactile gist might be considered as a scene representation and should be integrated into an assistive device for sightless people. The proposed approach may impact the design of mobility aids for VIP as it reinforces their natural mobility skills and may lead to new mobility strategies of VIP in (un-)known environment.

Development project for screen reader interface dynamically hastens speech while giving emphasized information to the tactile sense

In present screen readers for blind people, users are still required to continue listening to synthesized voices and also they might easily miss important points of a document. A development project of a new screen reader interface has been promoted in cooperation with Japan’s Ministry (METI). The interface named TAJODA can dynamically control the speech rate while giving rich texts to the tactile sense. The speech rate can be changed according to word units by clicking a button of the interface using a thumb. From evaluation tests using sightless people, the maximum speech rate was determined at around 2000 morae/minute. Seven vibro‐tactile patterns were selected for presenting rich texts onto an index finger using a tactile matrix display (2×8). Both speech and tactile information are synchronized automatically through a USB interface. It was also ascertained that users can read some documents two to three times faster using the TAJODA interface [Asakwa et al., IEICE Trans. E87‐D(6) (2004)].

The Blind Man and His Dog: The Public and Its Historians

Abstract This article suggests that the gap between professional historians and the public has grown during the past twenty-five years and that both the public and the profession have suffered as a result. It suggests further that historians in academic and nonacademic settings need to overcome institutional barriers that prevent them from providing better service to the public. Just as seeing-eye dogs guide sightless people to their destinations, professionally trained historians should be leading the public to a more promising future, thanks to their ability to separate objectively determined historical facts from self-serving, often ideological opinions and fantasies.

Development of a Low Cost Attachment to the Brailler to Produce Braille Copies of Diagrams: A Graphic AID to the Sightless People

This paper describes a low-cost attachment to the Brailler to enable the sightless to produce Braille hard copies of plain diagrams without any sighted assistance. The attachment is comprised of a scanning mechanism with a photo-electric sensor. The photo-electric sensor is traversed over the diagram to be copied. The Brailler carries the paper on which the copy is to be formed. The scanning unit and the Brailler are coupled so that the transverse and longitudinal motions of the original and copy papers are synchronized. The scanning starts from the top left hand corner of the diagram and is carried out from left to right in equally spaced horizontal lines. During the scanning motion, whenever the photo-electric sensor passes over dark areas, the resistance level of the sensor changes. This controls the loop gain of a positive feedback amplifier which in turn becomes unstable and generates an audio tone. This enables the Brailler operator to key in embossed dots at the appropriate locations. After the ent...

Recreation for Blind Adults.

Somewhat paradoxically, the average ophthalmologist has little contact with the blind. The reason for this, of course, is that by the time an individual is blind, the ophthalmologist, having exhausted all known forms of therapy, is powerless to help. One still is left with the moral responsibility of trying to return these sightless people to as normal a life as possible. Dr. Case has provided a most useful volume outlining the impact of blindness upon the psyche of the individual and describing techniques of rehabilitation and social readjustment. He has also added chapters on administration and operational principles in organizing groups to care for the blind.