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Social, Medical, and Educational Applications of IoT to Assist Visually Impaired People

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Internet of Things for Healthcare Technologies

Part of the book series: Studies in Big Data ((SBD,volume 73))

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Abstract

General daily tasks have always been a problem for visually impaired people. Identification of daily objects becomes a hectic task. Traditional methods such as a walking stick and a guide dog have been helpful to the visually impaired for basic navigation. Such, methods have a lot of limitations and often fail under varied situations. Technologies such as Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Image Processing (IP) Internet of Things (IoT), etc. have made a major contribution to overcoming the limitations. IoT brings a lot of technical and automated solutions to assist the visually impaired people. Data science and analytics are a major part of the process. Data accumulated via various sensors can be processed and used to identify obstacles and enhance basic navigation using haptic and voice feedback. Raw data goes through a series of analysis and refinement. This is then processed into a form which is understandable to the system and can be directly interpreted to perform various components of an application. These applications involve education, navigation, entertainment, security, consumer, etc. These applications are across various verticals of technologies differing in terms of hardware, software, and protocols. Various economically feasible and accurate solutions are now available. While, optimization remains an issue. These devices have generally been very helpful to ease the lives of visually impaired people. The main aim of this article is to provide essential details related to real-world applications of IoT in the field of education, healthcare, entertainment, security, navigation, and solutions to address the daily challenges faced by visually impaired people. The structure of the article includes introduction to IoT, applications of IoT in modern era is dealt in detail in Sect. 10.1. Followed by hardware device and communication technologies in Sect. 10.2. Section 10.3 deals with state of art which focus majorly on research contributions related to applications of IoT and smart devices benefiting the lives of visually impaired. Section 10.4 incorporates the future scope and concludes with a summary in Sect. 10.5. The article covers more than 30 research contributions in the past ten years which includes journal papers, conference papers and patents which provide a detailed and clear view on the research being carried out in the field of IoT to help the visually impaired.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, India

    Soham Sharma & M. Umme Salma

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  1. Soham Sharma
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  2. M. Umme Salma
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Correspondence to M. Umme Salma .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India

    Chinmay Chakraborty

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Amit Banerjee

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India

    Maheshkumar H. Kolekar

  4. Department of Computer Information Systems, Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, University of Malta, Msida, Malta

    Lalit Garg

  5. Faculty of Software and Information Science, Iwate Prefectural University, Takizawa, Japan

    Basabi Chakraborty

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Sharma, S., Umme Salma, M. (2021). Social, Medical, and Educational Applications of IoT to Assist Visually Impaired People. In: Chakraborty, C., Banerjee, A., Kolekar, M., Garg, L., Chakraborty, B. (eds) Internet of Things for Healthcare Technologies. Studies in Big Data, vol 73. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4112-4_10

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