Project Objectives
- The main goal of the project is to provide a cost-effective way to allow buildings to support blind people.
- The Blind Audio Guidance System hopes to allow visually impaired users to simply press a button, speak the desired destination, and be guided there with the use of audio instructions.
- The system hopes to provide a portable unit that can easily be carried and operated by a visually impaired user. It could easily be incorporated into a walking cane.
Design Possibilities
Many different design possibilities were explored during research.
- Wireless Sensor Networks – Due to the high amount of sensors required for large buildings, this may be impractical, especially when user direction must be tracked. Programming would be much more complex.
- RSSI Techniques – This can be effective at finding distances base on signal strength but is also affected by the direction problem.
- RFID – Seems to provide the most cost effective and simplest way to determine direction using the technique that the team has developed. The programming using this technique would also be less complex.
Challenges
- Low cost RFID readers have a short read range.
- Long range readers require more power and cost much more.
- Portability is difficult if high power is needed.
- RFID tag reads and read ranges may be inconsistent.
- RFID cannot inherently determine direction of approach.
- Speech recognition may be problematic due to unwanted noise and false reads.
Authors: Brey Danels, Oluakode Ogunmakin, George Agollah, Eric Worley
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