Smart Glasses for the Visually Impaired People
People with visual impairment face various problems in their daily life as the modern assistive devices are often not meeting the consumer requirements in term of price and level of assistance. This paper presents a new design of assistive smart glasses f
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Abstract. People with visual impairment face various problems in their daily life as the modern assistive devices are often not meeting the consumer requirements in term of price and level of assistance. This paper presents a new design of assistive smart glasses for visually impaired students. The objective is to assist in multiple daily tasks using the advantage of wearable design format. As a proof of concept, this paper only presents one example application, i.e. text recognition technology that can help reading from hardcopy materials. The building cost is kept low by using single board computer raspberry pi 2 as the heart of processing and the raspberry pi 2 camera for image capturing. Experiment results demonstrate that the prototype is working as intended. Keywords: Visually impaired
Text recognition OCR Raspberry pi 2
1 Introduction The number of visually impaired people is growing over the past decades. As reported by the world health organization (WHO), about 285 million people worldwide are estimated to be visually impaired [1]. However, until now many schools and jobs cannot accommodate them mainly due to lack of assistive technologies and economic barriers [2]. As a result, 90 % of them still live in low level of income [1]. Even when the new aids or technologies become available, they are either too expensive ($3000 and above), or affordable ($200) but with single or limited task functions only [3]. Among all assistive devices, wearable devices are found to be the most useful because they are hand free or require minimum use of hands [4]. The most popular type is head mounted device. Their main advantage is that the device points naturally at the viewing direction, thus eliminates the need of additional direction instructions, unlike other devices [5]. This paper presents a new design of smart glasses that can provide assistance in multiple tasks while maintaining at a low building cost. The design uses the new raspberry pi 2 single board computer, a camera, and an earpiece to convey information to the user. Due to page limit, we only demonstrate reading task only. The experiment results and how additional tasks may be added are discussed.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 K. Miesenberger et al. (Eds.): ICCHP 2016, Part II, LNCS 9759, pp. 579–582, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41267-2_82
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E. Ali Hassan and T.B. Tang
2 Related Works The most popular reading device is Braille reader which can read and/or write using an arrangement of dots to form different letters [4]. Another device is the audio book which read books or newspaper saved in audio format by certain suppliers [6]. Screen reader and e-book readers read digital content from computer screen, and convert the text to an audio format using a text-to-speech synthesizer [6]. Eyewear devices are the most recent technology. OrCam is a commercially released glasses that use an embedded computer with a gesture (a point of finger) recognition system to perform different tasks includes reading and convey them to the use
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