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A low-cost wearable support system for visually disabled people

Abstract:

According to World Health Organization (WHO), currently in the World there are around 39 million persons visually impaired. These persons need developing several daily activities in the same way that they are done by people without visual impairments. These activities can be very difficult or dangerous for visually impaired persons (e.g. using public transport, crossing streets, walking alone, etc.). On those grounds, in this paper we present a low-cost system able to meet some needs of blind persons, such as face recognition, reminders to take medications, automatic mail reading, automatic detection of objects and their distance, among others. The proposed system can be easily added to any type of glove. With the aim of determining the real feasibility of the proposed approach, we have carried a pilot experiment with 5 persons with visual impairments. The first part of pilot experiment consisted of determining the response of the device under 4 environments with different light conditions as well as the object detection. In the second part we have measured the perceptions of participants after using device in real conditions. The achieved results shown good agreement of users with respect to weight and handling of the device (80% of participants are strongly agree); whereas the comfort must be improved (60% of participants are agree).