BlindHelper: A Pedestrian Navigation System for Blinds and Visually Impaired

Notably valuable efforts have focused in helping people with special needs. Daily routine which is trivial for most of us is a real survival problem for groups of people with special needs and abilities, especially in a society with the bad habit to push to the side such people. This paper is focused on the problem of pedestrian navigation of visually impaired people. BlindHelper primarily enhances the ability of a visually impaired person to navigate efficiently to desired destinations without the aid of guides. Moreover it can provide multiple other uses during outdoor navigation such as dialing a call and notifying the current location in case of an emergency situation. The proposed system has been implemented as a smartphone application which interacts with a small embedded system responsible for reading simple user controls, high-accuracy GPS tracking of pedestrian mobility in real time, and identifying traffic light status and near-field obstacles along the route. This information is communicated to the smartphone application which in turn issues voice navigation instructions or undertakes further actions to help the user.