Gadget for Visually Impaired People #AssistiveTechnology @hackadayio @hackaday

Via Hackaday/Hackadayio, Syed Razwanul Haque Nabil has designed an assistive technology device – the Gadget for Visually Impaired People (GVIP). It has the ability to detect objects horizontally in front of people, much like a cane or pole is used by the visually impaired to navigate through a physical space.

This project is based on a Time of Flight sensor. Visually impaired  people generally use a cane outdoors but indoors a cane is not convenient specially to detect a obstacle just in front or horizontally. This project is not the direct replacement of a cane, rather it will help blind people to detect object in front of them. The laser sensor is much faster than a sonar sensor so its response time is faster. In this project, when a obstacle is detected, a vibration motor begins vibrating by which visually impaired people can understand a obstacle has been detected. A small lithium ion battery is in this device and the user can charge it using any micro usb cable or mobile charger. Power consumption of this device is very low.

The project uses an Adafruit VL53L0X – Time of Flight Sensor. The main advantages are speed of calculation (it relies on a single shot to compute the distances within a scene) and an efficient distance algorithm that simplifies the measurement of distance data. In contrast to stereo vision, which requires complex correlation algorithms, the process for extracting information for a time-of-flight sensor is entirely direct, requiring a small amount of processing power.

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