The design and implementation of a walking assistant system with vibrotactile indication and voice prompt for the visually impaired

This paper presents a comprehensive navigation system to assist the visually impaired in safely walking in their living areas. The system can provide the visually impaired vibrotactile hints of navigation and free directions during outdoor walking. The cluttered environmental information is acquired by Kinect cameras and ultrasonic sensors in real time. All the direction and obstacle avoidance instructions are transformed into a series of vibrating stimulus and actuated by the vibration belt. Meanwhile, GPS and speech recognition modules are used for navigation. Users can set destination through speech recognition module and get their current location by GPS module. With the help of Google terminal, the system can provide a wide range of path navigation to users. Three experiments are conducted to testify the effectiveness of the system. The results show that the method of detecting environment and indication way is effective.