Design and Implementation of Smart Shoes for Blind and Visually Impaired People for More Secure Movements

Abstract

Blind and visually impaired people encounter many challenges in their mobility and navigation. Their daily activities are obstructed due to their inability to adapt or identify accurately their surroundings which becomes the main reason of accidents, falling off, and getting lost in unknown areas. In this paper, the design, the implementation and the validation of smart shoes that would serve as an effective solution for more secured movements for blind and visually impaired people will be proposed. This system is developed to detect obstacles, wet floor and patients’ falls. In case of presence of one of the above incidents, the user will be notified acoustically using some voice alarms. Moreover, a compatible phone application is designed to notify the patient’s parents in case of any issue and share his location. As the system is dealing with human health, some safety measurements were taken into consideration in the design phase, mainly electrical safety, in order to reduce error and false alarms as well as to increase accuracy. The system was tested over five subjects and the results have shown low faulty errors and good accuracy and detection percentages along with an accuracy that reached about 96%.