Design, development and performance analysis of cognitive assisting aid with multi sensor fused navigation for visually impaired people

The research and innovations in the field of wearable auxiliary devices for visually impaired and blind people are playing a vital role towards improving their quality of life. However, in spite of the promising research outcomes, the existing wearable aids has several weaknesses such as more weight, limitations in the number of features and cost. The main objective of this manuscript is to provide the detailed design of a novel lightweight wearable aid with higher number of features for visually impaired and blind people. The proposed research aims to design a cognitive assistant that will guide the blind people for walking by detecting the environment around them. The framework include a Multi-Sensor Fused Navigation system comprises of a sensor-based, vision-based, and cognitive (intelligent/smart) application. The visual features for the design include obstacle detection, uneven surface detection, slope and downward steps detection, pothole detection and hallow object detection; location tracking, walking guide, image capturing and video recording. This prototype is named as Blind’s Apron based on its appearance. The invention focusses on parameters like reduction on size (quite handy) and light weight (comfortable to wear), higher number of detection features, and minimum user intervention (high end operations like switching on and off). All user interactions are friendly and affordable to everyone. The results obtained in this research lead to a high end technical intervention with ease of use. Finally, the performance of the proposed cognitive assistant is tested with a user study in real-time. The feedback and corresponding results establish the effective outcome of the proposed invention which is a light weight and feature enhanced device with easily understandable instructions.