IOT Based Smart Blind Stick to Help Blind People

Abstract

Currently the blind or visually impaired persons are using a simple helping stick to walk on the street or elsewhere and facing different problems regarding identifying obstacles. We came up with an idea of providing a smart blind stick to help them with identifying obstacles and walk safely. In this paper we have introduced a cost efficient and useful smart blind stick which will assist them to identify different obstacles and provide seamless walking. We were motivated to develop a smart blind stick to overcome these limitations. After designing the circuit in FRITIZING software we executed it into hardware. The smart blind stick is based on ultrasonic sensor and ESP-32 for visually impaired people. Ultrasonic sensors provide information about the environment to the user by activating the buzzer sound. Microcontroller (ESP-32) has been used to receive the signals from ultrasonic sensors and process them to a specific short pulses to the ESP-32 pins where buzzer is placed. Our proposed IOT based smart blind stick works at a range of given distance to detect obstacle and can deliver data to an android app. We tried to make a low cost smart blind stick by our project which is suitable for low income people and also it is light in weight. Our device can detect obstacles within the distance of about 30cm from the user.