Smart walking sticks for the visually impaired people

Abstract

This report presents the smart walking stick based on ultrasonic sensors and Arduino for visually impaired people. People with visual disabilities are often dependent on external assistance which can be provided by humans, trained dogs, or special electronic devices as support systems for decision making. Thus, we were motivated to develop a smart white cane to overcome these limitations. We accomplished this goal by adding ultrasonic sensors at specific positions to the cane that provided information about the environment to the user by activating the buzzer sound. We proposed low cost and light weight system designed with microcontroller that processes signal and alerts the visually impaired person over any obstacle, pits, elevated surfaces, through beeping sounds. The system consists of obstacle sensors for receiving, processing and sending signals to the alarm system which finally alerts the user for prompt action. The system was designed, programmed using C language and tested for accuracy and checked by the visually impaired person. Our device can detect obstacles within the distance of about 1m from the user.