Design and Realization of a Smart Stick for Blinds

A smart stick has been designed and realized for providing alert based assistance to the visually impaired and blind people for walking at the outdoor streets or at indoor house. The proposed smart blind stick has some exclusive additional features apart from its collision avoidance assistance feature, such as its low cost, fast response, low power consumption, lightweight, water indication, etc. The smart blind stick uses an ultrasonic sensor to identify the obstacles in front of the blind people and alert him/her via buzzer sound as well as mechanical vibration in order to avoid the obstacle; the smart stick is not only capable of detecting solid obstacles, but also it can alert the user when it detects the presence of water on the way by using appropriate water sensing arrangement. Rigorous performance evaluation of the prototype have been done by repetitive experiments for optimizing its accuracy of performance under numerous situations; in average the maximum achievable range of detecting the obstacles are found to be around 2 meters.