Smart Stick for the Visually Impaired Person

Blindness is an impairment in which the patient requires constant assistance with even the most basic of everyday tasks particularly in travelling alone without occurring accident. The project was designed to improve the level of independence of a visually impaired individual in travelling, utilizing the Smart Stick for the Visually Impaired Person will help them travel in flat and rugged terrain with high level of confidence as not to have accidents or injuries. The smart stick provides an obstacle detector and a speech synthesizer mechanism to guide the individual to certain obstacle and a change in the terrain elevation, it also helps the individual to locate the smart stick easily if they accidentally dropped or misplaced it, the device will create a sound through the buzz module. The following modules were also included; Obstacle detection, Terrain detection, Hand detection, Speech Synthesizer, and Sound module, all of which are connected to the Arduino Nano microcontroller. The prototype was tested considering all modules as mentioned above, having a 95 to 100 percent success rate for 20 testing trials in every module of the system. The study had presented an alternative way for the visually impaired individual to travel safely. The researcher recommended for future enhancement of the device to be paired with smart phones or an application based-GPS for tracking and monitoring.