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Low-Cost System for Travel Aid and Obstacles Detection for the Visually Impaired People

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Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Healthcare Science and Engineering (ICHSE 2018)

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Abstract

Disability is nowadays an issue present in the society. People affected by some disability usually have problems to carry out their daily tasks due to their dependency. Inside the known disabilities, the blindness is perhaps one of the most problematic ones due to the fact of not being able to freely move for fear of encountering some obstacle. We can find several commercial devices that help the bind to move. However, in most cases these solutions are too expensive. In this paper, we are going to present a low-cost system for travel aid and obstacles detection for the visually impaired people. The system consists of two parts, i.e., a belt with three acoustic sensors to measure distances and a bracelet that contains two vibration motors that codify the information that comes from the belt into a sort of vibration. To check the operation of this travel aid system, we have established a threshold of 1 m from which the bracelet should warn the user. Finally, the system has been tested in a controlled environment with very successful results.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by the “Programa operativo de Garantía Juvenil de la Junta de Andalucía y del Fondo Social Europeo” through the “Contratos de Investigación de Empleo Juvenil”.

Ethical approval and Informed consent

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Correspondence to Sandra Sendra .

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Sendra, S., Lloret, J., Romero, P., Parra, L. (2019). Low-Cost System for Travel Aid and Obstacles Detection for the Visually Impaired People. In: Wu, C., Chyu, MC., Lloret, J., Li, X. (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Healthcare Science and Engineering . ICHSE 2018. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 536. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6837-0_21

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