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Materials Today: Proceedings 5 (2018) 10665–10669 www.materialstoday.com/proceedings

ILAFM2016

An Electronic Smart Jacket for the Navigation of Visually

Impaired Society

B Siddharthaa, Arunkumar P Chavana, Dr. B V Umaa

a
R V College of Engineering Bengaluru – 560059, India

Abstract

According to World Health Organisation (WHO) study, 90% of the info to the human brain is sent through eyes alone. The Study
also says that there are about 285 million visually impaired or blind people across world. In this paper, we proposed an efficient,
reliable and low-cost wearable jacket for the people suffering from visual impaired. A smart jacket is designed by embedding the
sensor on the jacket, that enables the user to detect an obstacle and safely navigate. The prototype model has an accuracy of 98%
for obstacle with in 200cm. The smart jacket requires low power hence can be used for real time navigation for visually impaired
people.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Selection and/or Peer-review under responsibility of Second International Conference on Large Area Flexible
Microelectronics (ILAFM 2016): Wearable Electronics, December 20th–22nd, 2016.

Keywords: Visually Impaired; Navigational Aid; Smart Jacket;

E-mail address: siddhartha51997@gmail.com

2214-7853 © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Selection and/or Peer-review under responsibility of Second International Conference on Large Area Flexible Microelectronics (ILAFM 2016):
Wearable Electronics, December 20th–22nd, 2016.
10666 B Siddhartha et al. / Materials Today: Proceedings 5 (2018) 10665–10669

1. Introduction

WHO study suggests that 90% of the info to the human brain is sent through eyes alone. The WHO factsheet
2014, states that 285 million people are blind across the world. Among those 246 million are partially blind and 39
million are completely blind [1-2]. An efficient and economical device would be highly significant for visually
impaired people [3].
Visually impaired people usually use a white cane [4] or a guide dog for navigating outdoor. Even though a cane
is a simplest device, but it can only detect obstacle through making contact with the object. A guide dog is useful for
important tasks such as dodging obstacle and simple navigation however is not entire satisfactory, because a blind
person assisted by a guide dog is still not fully in-depended. Training and maintenance of specialized dogs are very
expensive [5]. Currently 3-5% of blind people have access to guide dogs.
The latest low cost smartphone devices, small and low cost embedded microprocessor and various low cost
sensor system together makes it expedient to augment an affordable, wearable, smart device to help blind people to
“sense”, “hear’, and “comprehend” these surrounding hence aiding them to navigate and reducing their problems [3].
To solve the problems of visual impaired people researcher has developed and tested electronically wearable jacket
that includes an ultrasonic sensors and GPS to detect an obstacle and safely navigate. The overall system is light
weight and includes a power bank up to 6 hours of navigation making it truly wearable.

2. Preceding work

Many researchers have developed system that can assist blind people in finding obstacle to easily navigate.
Mitushiro okayasu [6], developed a white cane, which detects an obstacle in both front and upper front side using
ultrasonic sensor. The user will get notification by a vibrator. The problem of white cane “many notifications will be
sent to the user and the result leads to fatigue”. A.S.M yasin.et.al [ 7] proposed a smart vision prototype which is a
navigational aid for detecting paths as well as obstruction avoidance for indoor and outdoor situations. V.weiss et.al
[8] developed a digital system for visually called smart walker. Smart walker uses radio, Global Positioning System,
Earphone, a keyboard & gives warning during dangerous situation.
X.lu & R.M [9] presented their device for supporting the visually impaired person with greater obstacle
avoidance and accident prevention system. A.Mohaney [ 10 ] presented steering device which uses uses digital
image processing for providing navigational assistance for blind people. S J Kien [11] developed RFID based
navigation system, user need to carry RFID sensor along with RFID tags. Kulkin et.al [12] combined RFID & robust
technology to assist visually impaired with indoor navigation. Dionist et .al [13] developed RFID based assistant to
blind people for searching & retrieving medicine at home. R.Tipu [14 ]developed an intelligent smartphone based
warning and obstacle detection.

3. Proposed System

The wearable Electronic jacket has two major units

1.Embedded Sensor 2. Smartphone. The block diagram of the wearable Electronic jacket is show in Fig.1 .

Fig. 1 Block diagram of the Smart jacket

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The embedded sensor unit has four sub modules -

1.Power Supply. 2.Sensor. 3.Communication 4. Microcontroller
The Power supply used for this module is 5V DC battery. The Microcontroller we selected was 32 bit ATMega
328p throughput approaching 1 MIPS per MHz, due to low cost, small size and less power Consumption. ATMega
328p is 32 pin IC, which has 32Kbytes of flash memory, Operating frequency of 20Mhz and pins for Ethernet, USB,
ADC and other I/O interfaces. Bluetooth Module allows the wearable jacket to communicate information to Smart
Phone. Bluetooth unit is one of the communication module allows the jacket to exchange data with smart phone.
The Sensor module consist of the ultrasonic sensor. We have used 4 ultrasonic sensors, Two sensors at the front and
two in the back of the jacket. The Ultrasonic sensor is employed to identify the obstacle and measure the distance
between obstacle and the person wearing the jacket. Pin Connections from Arduino to Bluetooth Module and
Ultrasonic Sensor is shown in Fig.2.

Fig.2 Pin Connections from Arduino to Bluetooth Module and Ultrasonic Sensor

Bluetooth Module-HC‐05 module is an Bluetooth module, developed for wireless serial connection setup. The
HC-05 Bluetooth Module can be used in a Master or Slave configuration. This serial port Bluetooth module use
Bluetooth Version 2.0 with EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) protocol with data throughput of about 3Mbps Modulation
with 2.4GHz radio transceiver. Vcc and Gnd of the module goes to Vcc and Gnd of Arduino. The TXD pin goes to
RXD pin of Arduino and RXD pin goes to TXD pin of Arduino i.e. (digital pin 0 and 1).

Fig. 3 Practical Test of Performance[15], Best is 300

Ultrasonic Sensors- The Practical test performance of HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor is shown in Fig.3. These
sensors are centered on the properties of acoustic waves with frequencies beyond the audible range (Above 20Khz).
Ultrasonic sensor operates by transmitting a Ultrasonic pulse of sound Waves, and then obtaining and processing the
properties of the reflected echo pulse. Ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04 provides 0.002m- 4m contactless ranging
function, the measuring accuracy can reach up to 3mm. The module has transmitters, receiver and control system in
a single package. Basically, Sensor works by sending an ultrasonic (well above human hearing range) pulse and
computing the time it takes to receive the echo. The Output from the sensor is in the form of a variable-width pulse
10668 B Siddhartha et al. / Materials Today: Proceedings 5 (2018) 10665–10669

that relates to the length to the target. The Module automatically sends eight 40 kHz by using input trigger for at
least 10us of logic 1 signal and identify whether there exists a pulse signal back from reflected wave. Vcc is
connected to 5V Gnd is connected to Gnd of Arduino. Trig of Sensors 1 to 4 are connected to digital pin 2 – 5
respectively and Echo of sensors 1 to 4 to digital pins 6 to 9 respectively.

4. Results

Initially, the prototype is examined by placing an obstacle in front of the jacket and measuring output response on
serial monitor. The Voice commands are played on the smartphone based on the direction of the sensor if the
obstacle is in front of the Left front senor then the audio “Front Left” and so on. Thus, making it easy for the user to
change the direction of his path. According to the model developed the prototype can estimate the obstacle with a
success rate of 98%. The Data from tests conducted using the prototype jacket is shown in Table.1.
Table.1: Actual Distance Vs Reading from the sensors

Actual Object Detected distance from the sensor (10 Read counts) Standard
Average
Distance (in cm) Deviation
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 50 0 50
70 72 72 71 71 72 72 72 72 72 72 0.42 71.8
100 101 101 102 101 100 101 101 102 102 101 0.63 101.2
130 130 125 131 130 127 126 125 128 127 127 2.12 127.6
150 154 148 148 148 148 149 148 148 148 149 1.87 148.8
170 168 170 170 167 168 170 170 167 169 168 1.25 168.7
200 198 199 197 197 197 199 197 195 197 197 1.16 197.3

ACTUAL DISTANCE VS DETECTED DISTANCE

OBJECT DISTANCE DETECTED DISTANCE

300
200 197.3
150 148.8 170 168.7
200 130 127.6
100 101.2
50 50 70 71.8
100
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Fig 4: Actual Object Distance Versus Detected Distance

The prototype was also tested for real life scenario with conditions that a visual impaired person will face. Fig. 5
shows the final prototype

Fig. 5: Environment Test and Complete prototype of wearable jacket

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5. Conclusion

Assessment of the state of art in the area of electronics travel aid for visually impaired people was developed,
implemented and tested. Electronic wearable jacket was designed to overcome most of the limitation of the existing
devices, integrating and navigation in a single unit. The efficient design along with affordable cost makes a device
with worldwide multiple application. The experimental results reported that system has excellent detection
performance of 98% for obstacle with in 200cm. In forthcoming work focuses on developing a further developed
device that uses the advantage of wearable jacket. The system can be easily extended to support multiple
applications such as Heart rate measurement for people with Heart related ailments and real time GPS tracking for
people with dementia thus the system is modular with multiple applications.

6. References

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