BHARATI PAWASKAR
Whereas the white cane allows blind or visually impaired persons to scan their surroundings for obstacles or orientation marks, it is only a physical device and has its own limitations. To overcome these limitations and do some value addition to the white cane, a smart stick has been developed by a team of budding engineering students who were mentored by their professor. It was a part of the final year project of Electronics and Telecommunication students of Padre Conceicao College of Engineering (PCCE), Verna.
The team comprises of electronics and telecommunications students, Nikita Sawant, Kajal Naik, Gauravi Kamat, and Siddhi Kandolkar and their professor, Dr Niyan Marchon who put together the concept of this smart stick, naming it ‘IRIS’. While explaining the concept, Dr Niyan Marchon, associate professor, Electronics and Telecommunication Department, head of training and placement office at PCCE, shares, “IRIS helps the visually impaired in navigation by conveying the obstacle information (distance and the kind of obstacle present in front) through earphones or headphones, thus fulfilling the seeing ability of the user by the hearing ability.”
The project has won the first place for project exhibition at Aarush 2019 held in the college. The project idea also bagged first place in THINK 2019 event held at Agnel Institute of Technology and Design (AITD), Assagao that also exhibited 15 other project ideas from various colleges. “We published a paper at the National Conference on ‘Recent Innovations in Engineering Science, Technology and Management (NCRIESTM) - 2019 held again, at AITD, Assagao on January 24-25 this year. We are currently awaiting the selection process at the IEEE conference, which is world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology,” informs Dr Niyan. IEEE’s core purpose is to foster technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity.
Now it is up to the team to wait and watch if the smart stick gains popularized and whether it is also helpful for onlookers in identifying the user as blind or visually impaired and to take appropriate care of that person. As we know, the white cane, worldwide, is an identity of absence of sight in the person who uses it.
However, IRIS has an added feature. It not only helps in easy navigation but also provides safety and security to the visually impaired by conveying the location information of the user along with an emergency text to the user’s relatives “ SOS (Save Our souls) System.
The idea of the project was to give independence to the visually impaired by helping them navigate in unfamiliar surroundings. According to World Health Organization (WHO), it is globally estimated that approximately 285 million people live with partial or complete blindness. Out of that almost 15 million are from India. A normal white cane or a guide dog is used by the visually impaired in our country to find out if any obstacles are present in front of them. But these methods are inefficient in various aspects and the person using it has to face several problems including restriction in their mobility. “IRIS can help them to move freely and perform their work with ease,” claims the project guide Dr Niyan.
The credit for the initial idea goes to Gauresh Hadfadkar who noticed a visually impaired person struggling with the cane and suggested that something must be done to overcome the struggles. The team decided to go with this idea. Kajal and Nikita did programming the various modules, and roped in others too. Another student Saiesh Raut extended a helping hand too. Basically the four-member-team unitedly, designed and created the prototype stick interfacing all the modules. Finally, the smart stick was tried, tested and evaluated by Arun Torgal who is himself, visually impaired.
How does the smart stick IRIS work? The working is simple but efficient. A conventional PVC pipe forms the stick onto which ultrasonic sensors, IR sensor, camera, GPS module, GSM Module which are all interfaced with Raspberry Pi are mounted at different positions to detect and identify obstacle in the path of the user. When the user encounters an obstacle, the ultrasonic sensor detects this obstacle and triggers the camera to click a picture. This picture is then sent to Google Cloud Vision API.
Google Cloud Vision API consists of pre-trained machine learning models which identifies the most prominent object in the image and upon identifying sends a response back to the Raspberry Pi in the form of labels containing information about the obstacle. These labels are in text form which are converted into speech using text-to-speech converter and given as an audio output via earphones. Thus the seeing ability of the user is fulï¬lled by the hearing ability. Also, a button called as the SOS (Save Our Souls) button is present on the stick which when pressed contacts the user’s relatives by sending them emergency message along with the user’s location. It does this task by using a GSM and a GPS module. In addition ‘IRIS’ contains another button to shut down the system when not in use and this is the power button. Wow!
If further developed, smart stick IRIS bears the potential for improvisation by adding more features to it - such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for recognising the denomination of money, expiry dates etc. Also, the system can be made less bulky for easy manoeuvring for the user.
Currently, there are some systems available in the market such as Laser Cane, Sonic Torch, Sonic Path Finder, Mowat Sensor, Meldog, Navbelt, etc. Called ETA (Electronic Travel Aid) these systems are created to improve mobility for visually impaired by detecting the obstacle but not giving an idea of its kind. ETAs are bulky, expensive and not very accurate. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, most of these ETAs cost between 300-3000 dollars. Although there are some cheaper options available in India at a price range of 40- 50 dollar, it only uses sensors such as ultrasonic sensor or laser to detect an obstacle but does not identify it.
The cost of smart stick IRIS comes to around Rs 5000. If manufactured on a large scale, this cost can come down to Rs 2000. Its added feature detects and identifies obstacles with accuracy and has SOS service too.
