Wireless Bus Identification System for Visually Impaired Person

Abstract

The goal of this work RF based Wireless communication is to simplify the traveling and movement of visually impaired person. As someone who is totally blind, every day presents its own challenge. But the biggest problem still remains are traveling in public transport. Usually travelling by bus is considered to be safe and comfortable but when it comes to outdoor environments then it very difficult to manage navigation for people who are born completely blind. In the bus transport system, the route numbers are only displayed on the number plate due to which a visually challenged person has to rely on sighted assistance that also makes them dependent on others and lowers their self-esteem. Visually impaired people have adopted various measures to access public transport that make them dependent on others that are sometimes unreliable. So, keeping in mind these problems we have come up with an idea to help exclusively for visually impaired persons who are the daily commuters accessing public transport by the use of recent advancements in the technology. The purpose of this is to design and propose a model that will help the visually disabled person to navigate in outdoor surroundings and fulfill their requirement of identification. The proposed system consists of two detection subsystems: (i) Visually impaired person's personal assistance segment, and, (ii) Bus driver's segment. When the user (blind person) reaches the bus station and switches on his device, the ultrasonic sensor senses the presence of the bus in the nearby area and transmits the bus presence to the Arduino. To this, the buzzer beeps and the visually impaired person get to know about the presence of the bus in the nearby area. The blind person then turns on the toggle switch on the user module, thereby indicating his presence to the bus driver. Henceforth, begins the working of bus driver's module. The information transmitted by the blind person is received by the receiver installed on bus driver's module and thereby gets notified by a buzzer. In order to reply to the blind person, the bus driver takes the help of a Bluetooth application which has a wireless connection with the Bluetooth module installed over the user's module from his phone. The bus driver sends an acknowledgement to the blind person by entering an alphabet ‘a’ from the Bluetooth app. The second buzzer installed in the blind person's device beeps on receiving the acknowledgement, thereby confirming his presence. Thus by this way, wireless communication is carried out between the bus driver and the visually impaired person using RF module. The result shows that the proposed system is exhibiting a better safety, cost and practicality in performance.