THE 3 rd INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCES OF STUDENTS AND YOUNG RESEARCHERS dedicated to the 99
th
anniversary of the National Leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev
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SMART DEVICE FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE Aysel Abdullayeva, Aytan Sadirova, Gulustan Abdullayeva Baku Higher Oil School Baku, Azerbaijan aysel.abdullayeva.std@bhos.edu.az, ayten.sadirova.std@bhos.edu.az, gulustan.abdullayeva.std@bhos.edu.az Supervisor: Ph.D, Associate Professor Kamala Pashayeva Keywords: Smart cane, assistive technology, visually-impaired, sensor, ultrasonic
Introduction For many years, those blind people who used a cane relied on a whatever
type of cane was available, such as walking sticks, for assistance. A common
type of cane that began to appear in the twentieth century was the short, support
cane. These canes are about waist-high and curve at the top. No formal
methods on use or instruction for travel was developed for this cane. Physical
movement is a challenge for visually impaired people, because it can
become tricky to distinguish obstacles appearing in front of them, and they
are not able to move from one place to another. Over the last decades,
research has been conducted for new devices to design a good and reliable
system for visually impaired people to detect obstacles and warn them at
danger places. The main aim of this initiative is to enable the blind navigate
with confidence and to be alert if their walking route becomes obstructed with
other things, people or related odds.
Application Ultrasonic Cane as a Navigation Aid (UltraCane): Three ultrasonic trans-
receivers, X-bee-S1 trans-receiver module, two Arduino UNO
microcontrollers, three LED panels, and piezo buzzer are used in this cane.
The target of the three ultrasonic sensors is to detect the ground and aerial
obstacles in range of 5 cm to 150 cm. Once an ultrasonic wave is detected,
a control signal is generated and it triggers the echo pin of the
microcontroller. The microcontroller records the width of the time duration of
the height of each pin and transforms it to a distance. The control signal will
be wirelessly transferred by X-bee to the receiving unit which would be worn
on the shoulders. The buzzer will be played to alert the user based on the
obstacle’s approach (high alert, normal alert, low alert and no alert).
