Applicable operational mechanisms to assist visually impaired people-A WSN perspective

Wireless Body Area Network has been identified as a promising technology for supporting health-care, elderly care and visually impaired people. Crowd detection is one of the main issues in navigating the blind people across the known and unknown terrains. The visually impaired person will be equipped with sensors which will detect human crowd and alert the person accordingly. This paper attempts to comprehensively review all the research and development to serve visually impaired persons. A variety of strategies, sensors, communication standards and data transmission techniques are analyzed and compared according to their accuracy, compactness, computation performance and cost. The intention of this survey is not to criticize, but to provide reference to future research and development.