Detection of Obstacles and Steps by a White Cane Device for Visually Impaired People

A lot of visually impaired people have difficulty in going out alone with a white cane because they potentially have a risk of accident such as collision with obstacles and a fall from steps. The main reason of these problems is that they cannot touch some obstacles and steps by a developed white ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2019 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM) pp. 1491 - 1496
Main Authors Tsuboi, Yuichi, Shimono, Tomoyuki, Izumi, Mayuko, Takano, Yousuke, Goshima, Osamu
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.07.2019
Subjects
Acoustics
Batteries
Force
Lasers
Microcomputers
Sensors
Vibrations
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Summary:A lot of visually impaired people have difficulty in going out alone with a white cane because they potentially have a risk of accident such as collision with obstacles and a fall from steps. The main reason of these problems is that they cannot touch some obstacles and steps by a developed white cane. To solve these problems, the purpose of this research is to detect obstacles and steps by a white cane device. The proposed device has two sensors to detect obstacles and steps, and one voice coil motor to inform the existence of obstacles and steps. In this paper, three experiments were carried out to verify the effectiveness of a method to detect obstacles/steps existence and to inform users by the proposed device. From experimental results, although the proposed system sometimes has the difficulty in the obstacle detection, the effectiveness in the steps detection can be confirmed.
ISSN:2159-6255
DOI:10.1109/AIM.2019.8868872