NavEye: Smart guide for blind students

Abstract

Blind students all over the world need guidance to navigate around the city or university campus. It is estimated that 374,400 visually impaired students attended colleges at some point in the United States alone. With the rapid technological advancement, new opportunities are emerging to make life easier for blind students. Motivated by the problem, the objective of this project is to design, prototype and evaluate a smart guidance system to help blind students navigate from and to classrooms. To design such a system, the design team had to exercise several design steps typically involved in an engineering design process. The steps include literature research, requirements specification, solution brainstorming, system functional decomposition, functional modeling, prototype implementation and testing. The designed system consists of two fully integrated modules; a mobile application and a smart cane. The blind student interacts with the mobile application using voice commands. The blind student can instruct the mobile application to navigate him/her to a desired destination (eg. classroom). On the other hand, the cane helps the blind student to avoid obstacles and alerts him/her when walking off track. The cane and the mobile application are synchronized via Bluetooth technology. The system was modularly designed, tested and finally integrated together. Testing exhibited promising results and proved to be beneficial to such an important sector of the society.