Blind Sense

Our Story

We designed this project to give aid to the visually impaired in a different way than a normal walking stick. One of our group members has a family member, a former veteran, who had lost their ability to see. With this in mind and the project tracks presented to us, we took the time to brainstorm ideas and found our project: "Blind Sense"

What it does

Unlike a normal walking stick, our project takes the form of a hat. This hat allows the visually impaired to walk around and have a sense of where people are located around them. This allows them to have free hands and quicker reaction times to avoid bumping into someone. The hat also enables them to directly address individuals in front of them.

How we built it

We build our project using an Arduino board, a webcam, and a raspberry pi. The Arduino board houses the wiring to our buzzer modules (substitutable to any other audible module) as well as the code to power them. Using the CVZone python library, we are able to create a script that runs on our raspberry pi that takes in video from our webcam and tracks faces and their locations. Using this data, our pi board will feed the data into the Arduino that holds code to operate the buzzers. This code takes into account the position of faces as well as the distance from the camera and determines which buzzer to turn on, at what strength, and what interval. We finished our project by housing all the boards and webcams onto a baseball cap.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few problems throughout the project. One was that while we were able to run the python script from our computers into the Arduino; we found that when trying to run the code, our raspberry pi was deprived of resources to run correctly. We solved this by optimizing our code to run based of the specs of the raspberry pi and we achieved success and stability. A second issue we faced was trying to make our hat portable and not be tethered into a laptop. We did this by using a portable power bank to power the raspberry pi (which in turn powers the Arduino board) which can be housed in a pocket or a bag.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest thing we are proud of is being able to develop a script that takes video input and produces data that can be read by a microcontroller and react based of that data physically. Furthermore, we had to do this across two different languages as the script is ran in python, but our Arduino board uses C++.

What we learned

Doing this project, we learned many applicable aspects of computer engineering, coding, and product design. We learned how the CVZone and Arduino python libraries function and how by building a compatible system, we achieve a functioning product.

What's next for Blind Sense

The possibility to continue this project is very high. In our product design, we had managed to think of many optimized parts but were restricted with time and resources. We could use more compact microcontrollers, use wireless webcams with higher resolutions, and add more features. These could include threat detection, crosswalk detection, and facial recognition.