Republic of the Philippines

Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

ON THE GO: AN ARDUINO-BASED

SMART BLIND STICK FOR VISUALLY
IMPAIRED

PRESENTED BY:

Andino, Zedrick Ortiguez

Perez, Rafhael Herjas
Caringal, Renerose Gordon
Catapang, Esperanza Maligaya
Mateo, Keila Jeune Oanes
Custodio, Wea Cabadin
Macalalad, Nomelyn De Castro
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

INTRODUCTION

Technology is the making, modification, usage and knowledge of tools,

machines, techniques, crafts, systems and methods of organization in order to solve a

problem, improve a pre-existing solution to the problem, achieve a goal or perform a

specific function. It can also be referred to the collection of such tools, machinery,

modifications, arrangements and procedures. Technologies significantly affect human

as well as other animal species' ability to control and adapt to their natural

environments.

Blindness is a state of lacking the visual perception due to physiological or

neurological factors. The partial blindness represents the lack of integration in the

growth of the optic nerve or visual center of the eye and total blindness is the full

absence of the visual light perception. Blindness is a term that used to describe people

that cannot use the ability to see (Arditi et al., 1998). According to Research, 253 million

people are visually impaired and from that 36 million people are completely blind and

217 million people are living with low sight or vision (WHO, 2018).

Human beings receive around 80% of the information from the environment via

sight. Therefore, for blind people, it became difficult for them to fit in natural life. That’s

why they used either the ordinary white cane, a dog, or the help of other human beings.
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

Imagine walking into an unfamiliar place. One has to ask for guidance in order to reach

to the destination. Without any form of assistance, most of the visually impaired people

have to stress their other senses, mostly the ears, in an attempt to detect any possible

obstacles in their path. Visually impaired persons including deaf-blind, blind and low

vision people require assistance in their daily life. Physical movement is a challenge for

them, because it can become tricky to distinguish where he is, and how to get where he

wants to go from one place to another (Narayanrao, 2016).

Recently many studies have dealt with smart stick design (Manikanta, et al.,

2016). The smart stick is a technique to help sightless people to recognize their way.

Sightless people suffer from the lack of ability to do their daily activities, from walking in

the street to visiting friends or relative or any daily things. Therefore, the solution for this

major problem is proposed by designing a stick that can aid the person to walk safely

without having fear of hitting someone on the way or any solid objects.

Several attempts have been made to design guard or obstacle avoidance

devices for the blind using components with limited number of applications. An

ultrasonic sensor based blind stick is proposed by Agarwal et al., 2015 with GPS

system, vibrating motor and a buzzer. As they didn’t give any pictorial view of the stick,

so according to device description it seems to be pretty heavy. Besides that, there was

no information about how long the buzzer & vibrator would be in ON condition. And the

sending SMS issue by an illiterate blind person seems to be quite impossible. In 1973,
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

an optical triangulation-based laser cane was proposed, which could only detect head-

height obstacles. And in 1989, a navigating device equipped with a small computer and

sensors was planned. It took images and then translated them into a series of audio

cues to inform the user which routes are blocked by obstacles (Borenstein et al., 1997)

And after late nineties, wearable obstacle detection system was introduced, which was

quite heavy to wear and handle (Cardin et al.).

The development of technology requires the innovation of a device that can be

used to help the blind as a road guide. This device is kind of a cane to help blind people

to scan their surroundings for obstacles or orientation marks. This device is equipped

with an ultrasonic sensor and a buzzer that will be mounted on a cane to determine

changes in the environment. Ultrasonic sensors are used to detect obstacles in front of

it by utilizing ultrasonic wave reflection and the buzzer will be the user’s warning signal

upon receiving the information from ultrasonic sensor that there’s an obstacle in front of

the user. Using this blind stick, a visually impaired person can walk more confidently.

This stick detects the object in front of the person and give response to the user either

by vibrating or through command. So, the person can walk without any fear. This device

will be best solution to overcome their difficulties.

 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Visually impaired people are the people who finds it difficult to recognize the

smallest detail with healthy eyes. Due to the absence of visual perception, people are

deprived of enjoying the beauty of nature and lack to fulfill their desires and needs.

Visually impaired people have small interactions in the surrounding area (Anwar, 2017).

Visual impairment is the loss of vision (of a person) or a significant limitation of

visual capability resulting from either disease, trauma, or congenital or degenerative

conditions that cannot be corrected by conventional means, such as refractive

correction, medication, or surgery. Those who have the visual acuteness of 6/60 or the

horizontal range of the visual field with both eyes open have less than or equal to 20

degrees. These people are regarded as blind.

A survey by WHO (World Health Organization) carried out in 2011 estimates that

in the world, about 1% of the human population is visually impaired (about 70 million

people) and amongst them, about 10% are fully blind (about 7 million people) and 90%

(about 63 million people) with low vision. (Nowak, et al., 2015). The main problem with

blind people is how to navigate their way to wherever they want to go. Such people

need assistance from others with good eyesight. As described by WHO, 10% of the
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

visually impaired have no functional eyesight at all to help them move around without

assistance and safely.

Smart walking stick senses obstacles on the lane, pit, and water to support the

blind (Gayathri et al., 2014). For the identification of obstacles various companies uses

Atmega328 microcontroller and some of the companies like Iwalk detects object using

Arduino (Olanrewaju et al., 2017). Numerous devices use an ultrasonic sensor and the

Arduino to detect the obstacles placed in different locations (Wang et al., 2018).

Using this smart blind stick, a visually impaired person can walk without anyone’s

help. The smart blind stick automatically detects the obstacle in front of the person and

give a response to the person by vibrating the stick and also with a warning sound. The

objectives of this research are to design an assistive technology for visually impaired

people that can detect obstacles for the blind and to alarm the user through vibration for

the possible obstacle in front of them.

 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

This study aims to assess the efficacy of an Arduino-based smart blind stick as a

white cane for visually impaired.

Specifically, it sought to answer the following questions:

1. Is Arduino-based smart blind stick a better help for visually impaired person
during their travel?
2. How does the Arduino-based smart blind stick help the visually impaired
people in their daily lives?
3. What is the significant difference between the Arduino-based smart blind stick
and white cane?
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

REFERENCES

Agarwal, A., Kumar, D., Bhardwaj, A. 2015."Ultrasonic Stick for Blind," International

Journal of Engineering and Computer Science, vol. 4, Issue 4.

Anwar, A. 2017. Smart Stick for Assisting Blind People. IOSR J. Computer Engineering,

vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 86–90, doi: 10.9790/06611903028690.

Arditi, A., Rosenthal, B. 1998. Developing an Objective Definition of Visual Impairment.

Proceedings of the International Low Vision. pp. Pp 331-334.

Borenstein, J., Ulrich, I. 1997."The Guide Cane-A Computerized Travel Aid for The

Active Guidance of Blind Pedestrians," IEEE International Conference on

Robotics and Automation, Albuquerque, NM.

Cardin, S., Thalmann, D., Vexo, F. “Wearable Obstacle Detection System for Visually

Impaired People”.

Gayathri, G., Vishnupriya, M., Nandhini, R., Banupriya, M. M. 2014. Smart walking

stick

for visually impaired, International Journal of Enginering And Computer Science

(IJECS), vol.3, No.3, pp.4057-4061.

Manikanta, A. P. K. S., Phani, T.S.S. 2016. “Implementation of Smart Stick for Obstacle

Detection and Navigation,” vol. 02, no. 05, pp. 45–50

 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas

Narayanrao, J. V. 2016. “Safety Stick for Blind People Using Microcontroller”.

International Journal of Engineering Development and Research, Volume 4,

Issue 2.

Nowak M. S., Smigielski, J. 2015. “The Prevalence and Causes of Visual Impairment

and

Blindness among Older Adults in the City of Lodz, Poland.” Medicine, vol 94,

number 5, pp. e505, doi:10.1097/MD.0000000000000505.

Olanrewaju, R. F., Radzi M. L. A. M., Rehab, M. 2017. "iWalk: Intelligent walking stick

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visually impaired subjects," in Proc. IEEE 4th International Conference on Smart

Instrumentation, Measurement and Application (ICSIMA), Putrajaya, pp. 1-4.

Wang, M., Li, R., Zhang, R., Li, G., Zhang, D. 2018. "A Wearable SSVEP-Based BCI

System for Quadcopter Control Using Head-Mounted Device," in IEEE Access,

vol. 6, pp. 26789-26798.

WHO. 2018. Universal eye health: a global action plan 2014–2019. Available:

http://www.who.int/blindness/actionplan/en/.
 Republic of the Philippines
Region IV – CALABARZON
Department of Education
Division of Batangas
Nasugbu East Senior High School
Lumbangan Nasugbu, Batangas