Real Time Assistive Shoe For Visually Impaired People

using IoT
R. Arthi, Utkalika Das, Vemuri Jyoti Kiran, Anukiruthika RL, Mathan Krishna
Abstract The work is administrated for the visually impaired individuals to help them to search out
obstacles whereas walking or the other work which needs movement and has created it
straightforward to help them. Sight is taken into account the foremost necessary sense and also the
blind individuals square measure discovered upon pityingly by others. During this, world measures
presently 253 million people that square measure suffering with visual disorder out of those
individuals thirty-six million individuals square measure utterly blind. Most of the days people kept
on using ancient strategies like canes to understand whether or not any obstacle is gift or not, this
technique fails typically as a result of it cannot sense any obstacle that square measure higher than the
bottom level and conjointly carrying a cane continually makes life uneasy, and it’s tough to
understand what obstacle they're passing through nearby. So, so as to form things straightforward for
them in attempt with these challenges we wish to develop a sensible shoe which may sight the
obstacles before it and may inform the blind man what obstacle is on his method. Internet of things
(IoT) is creating electronic devices to speak with one another or with humans. During this sensible
shoe we tend to use inaudible sensing element to understand in what proportion distance the article is
and a picture sensing element to understand that obstacle is on our method, we tend to connect of
these on (AU) Arduino Uno and everyone these communicate with one another. the utilization of
inaudible sensors helps in scheming distance of the hurdles lying within the path of blind man. This
device helps in providing best offered track to the user within the kind of audio. The sensors square
measure integrated with the shoe so the blind man cannot solely sight obstacles ahead however
conjointly sight the presence of any major pits on the method. This Application results in enhancing
the understanding of the issues facing blind individuals daily, and should facilitate encourage
additional comes targeted to assist blind individuals to measure freelance in their daily lives .

______________________
R. Arthi . Utkalika Das . Vemuri Jyoti Kiran . Anukiruthika RL . Mathan Krishna K
Department of ECE, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Ramapuram Campus, Chennai, Tamil
Nadu, India
R. Arthi
e-mail: [email protected]
Utkalika Das
e-mail: [email protected]
Vemuri Jyoti Kiran
e-mail: [email protected]
Anukiruthika RL
e-mail: [email protected]
Mathan Krishna
e-mail- [email protected]
Keywords VISUALLY IMPAIRED, BLIND PEOPLE, real time system, Arduino, ESP32 cam
module, Ultrasonic and other sensors, Image Processing.

INTRODUCTION
On an estimation, 285 million people worldwide are visually impaired. 39 million people are blind
and 246 are visually impaired. About 90% of the world's blind people live in low-income areas, and
82% of the visually impaired are over the age of 50. In fact, most technical assistance services aim,
at assisting people with disabilities rely on the use of canes [1]. These sticks are technologically
advanced, but their size, the need to operate them all the time (one hand is not free), and the fact that
they can break if they hit something hard. and many other issues are still up for debate and they are
Expensive, hard to see, road bumps, etc. Therefore, the aim of this work is to develop low-cost, high-
precision smart shoe for the visually impaired [2]. The system detects obstacles and allows safe
movement indoors and outdoors and helps in providing quick medical. Previously, visually impaired
people had difficulty moving and moving from one place to another. Some of them had guide dogs to
help them walk and avoid collisions. Some of them asked others for help. This has led many
developers to create products that support the visually impaired and make them feel more
independent. No product is perfect, but there is always room for improvement. We tried to help these
people with smart shoes. Many blind people require travel aids to navigate in unknown environments.
We present blind shoe or more of a smart shoe project that enable the visually impaired users with
mobility impairment to avoid obstacles [3]. By leveraging existing robotics technologies, our system
detects obstacles such as curves, and staircases in the ground or even fire and water, and transmits
obstacle information through haptic feedback that is done using buzzers producing beeps [4]. Initial
experiments show that our device enables human users to navigate safely in indoor and outdoor
environments. Being blind generally refers to a complete lack of functional vision. However,
blindness involves varying levels of vision ability, sometimes under varying conditions. Vision is the
result of light rays hitting the back of the eye, or retina, and then the optic nerve transmitting electrical
signals to the brain. Blindness occurs when an inadequate amount of light hits the retina, or the
information has not been delivered to the brain correctly.[5] With the advancement of computer
science and electronics towards IoT and machine learning (ML) one can make things easy accessible
for the people who are visually impaired. The major goal of the proposed work helps visually
impaired users to identify the acquaintance whom they are meeting in their everyday life with the
latest technology of IoT and ML. Though the very beginning of this introduction had its own
advantages and disadvantages. But work on enlightening the most of IoT and its accessibility
anywhere, for the help of visually impaired. Visually impaired people use their strong hearing ability
to find the person conversing with them, but are not always identified exactly.[6] The real challenge
here was to put everything in execution and make the shoe working.[7] The proposed scheme works
on the principle of obstacle detection and detect fall, send signal to Node MCU which further sends
signal to emergency number and image processing for enhanced clarity. In identifying the type of
obstacle using sensors and detecting fall. The assistive system has a significant function in the method
of live GPS and interprets the faces or surrounding identified to the visually impaired person or and
creates the situation for them to react to situations without depending on someone else but directly
ambulance. In this paper, we have proposed to provide a new interface support system for visually
impaired person to independently handle everyday life activities like recognising and sensing trouble.
The ultrasonic sensor works in an range of 10 meters and provide detection of obstacle. There are
three different types of sensors being used for the purpose.[8] The pair of infrared sensors can be
detecting the obstacles to presence in the user pathway. May it be a pit or stone or living being or
anything. [9] The visually impaired people would get the information about the obstacles in the form
of vibration, more the distance between the obstacle and person less will be the pitch of vibration
more the distance, more the pitch of vibration. There will be different types of beeps for different type
of obstacle depending on the sensor it detects. And, if by any chance person falls, or gets any kind of
injury from living or non-living being, there will be a quick intimation to the ambulance through Node
MCU after pictures of the fall are uploaded in IFTTT. Node MCU gives live GPS tracking after
request for location is sent by parents, friends or caretaker through sim 800L [10
]. We shall work more on i) image processing in future and try on ii) working a mobile application for
the blind people to sense trouble with a greater clarity, realising iii) tall building or a 360° sensor
rotation and moreover making the shoe waterproof.

RELATED WORK
The learning show requires a large framework with machine learning. Learning shows require large
frameworks with efficient processors to run at maximum productivity. To identify faces in an
uncontrolled environment, the framework must identify the first detected image. Another important
part of the proposed system is the electrical safety of the plan according to the IEC 60601 standard. If
this occurs, you will be in a safe state. Our motivation is to make it easy and comfortable, and more
importantly, to make it easy to use for people with visual impairments. is called face recognition
processing. This process requires special assistance from consumers of this product. In it, the
developer proposed a framework called Smart Vision that would make a difference when disabled
people navigate in unfamiliar environments such as indoors and outdoors. Inputs for the framework
can come from geospatial frameworks (GIS). The authors proposed a system that recognizes hand
gestures in greetings such as: It also includes other symbols such as thumbs up, no, or headline
symbols. They used an artificially intelligent neural tissue classifier built with combined highlights
and underwent basic analysis of a large number of descriptors. Adding to the existing problems, it
becomes difficult to achieve 100% efficiency in any ML model, and small mistakes can cause many
problems in everyday use. An important task of face recognition and recognition algorithms is to
correct the errors of previous methods and algorithms and provide even more efficient systems.

SYSTEM DESIGN
The system design used in this work detects the obstacles which makes the buzzer to alert to assist the
visually impaired people thereby will help to navigate while travelling. To measure the obstacles
distance ultrasonic sensor was used. Blind people will face a lot of challenges in their daily life, some
challenges are routine, and some are not. Out of all the problems they face the most common problem
they face is when they travel from one place to other by walk. Most of the times they use traditional
methods like canes to know whether any obstacle is present or not, this method fails sometimes
because it cannot sense any obstacle which are on top of the waist and carrying a cane wherever they
go makes them feel uncomfortable. They also face challenge when they fall somewhere where there is
no person to help them. Along with the visually impaired people their family members or caretaker
also worried about the blind person always as they don’t know where they may go once, they step out
of house. To help visually impaired people and their caretaker we developed a smart shoe. The
purpose of the smart shoe is to detect an obstacle in the way and to make the blind person know it and
when the blind person falls it will inform to the ambulance and also it will provide the location to
ambulance and caretaker whenever they required.
 START OBSTACLE BATTERY
SENSORS AURDINO BUZZER

PIR IR UT

Fig1: Block Diagram of detecting the obstacles and signals

We use two microcontrollers one is Arduino UNO and NODE MCU (ESP 8266). The general
architecture of purpose work is depicted in the fig below. The Arduino UNO is connected to four
sensors and a buzzer which has four types of beep sounds. [As shown in Fig1]. The four sensors to
what the Arduino connected are ultrasonic sensor (HCSR04), MOISTURE SENSOR (DSM 8120),
PIR SENSOR (HC 7EN), IR SENSOR (LM 393). The ultrasonic sensors measure distance between
obstacle and blind person by using ultrasonic waves. The sensor head emits an ultrasonic wave and
receives the wave reflected from the target. Ultrasonic Sensors measure the distance to the target by
measuring the time between the emission and reception. Moisture Sensor is one kind of low-cost
electronic sensor that is used to detect the moisture of the soil. This sensor can measure the volumetric
content of water inside the soil. This sensor is consisting of mainly two parts, one is Sensing Probs
and another one is the Sensor Module. A PIR is a passive infrared sensor used to detect motion, so a
PIR is a passive motion detector that waits for infrared temperature from body heat to trigger an
activity. In other words, it can sense motion through changes in temperature. IR sensor is used in a
wide range of wireless applications which includes remote controls and sensing. The infrared part in
the electromagnetic spectrum can be separated into three main regions: near IR, mid-IR & far IR. The
wavelengths of these three regions vary based on the application. Arduino UNO is a microcontroller
board based on the ATmega328P. It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as
PWM outputs), 6 Analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator, a USB connection, a power jack, an
ICSP header and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller;
simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with an AC-to-DC adapter or battery
to get started. You can tinker with your UNO without worrying too much about doing something
wrong, worst-case scenario you can replace the chip for a few dollars and start over again.
 Fig2: Architectural Block Diagram

RESULTS DISCUSSION
Our application results enhance the understanding of the problems facing by visually impaired daily.
In travelling from one to another, there is a great need for electronic travel assistance for visually
impaired persons. The electronic travel aid will be useful for them during the time of their travel to
identify obstacles on their route. And there are also incidents, injuries and crashes to prevent. The
combination of both hardware and software, which is user-friendly, is a smart shoe for visually
disabled people. They can use our prototype, which is cost effective and easy to use.
When the person started moving wearing the shoe there is an obstacle in his way and buzzer started to
make beep 1 as he gets close the obstacle the intensity of sound is also increasing. As the ground the
person is walking is wet the shoe identified it through moisture sensor and produced sound beep 2.
There is a living organism in his way the buzzer in shoe started to do the sound beep 3. As smoke is
detected by shoe it started to o sound beep 4. The person wearing show fall it immediately sent a
message to the ambulance. The ambulance sent a message to SIM800L in shoe then it received
location information from shoe. The caretaker ton know the blind person location texted to SIM800L
for location and he received the information about location
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The proposed work is a smart shoe for visually impaired people in order to help them in facing their
daily problems. The project proposes a prototype model of warning system to avoid collisions and
accidents for visually impaired people. The smart shoe consists of two microcontrollers Arduino,
Node MCU (ESP 8266) along with various sensors like Ultrasonic sensor (HCSR04), Moisture
Sensor (DSM 8120), PIR sensor (HC 7EN), IR sensor (LM 393), Gyro sensor (MPU 6050), GPS
sensor (NEO 6M) and it also has SIM800L. This also uses a cloud platform called IFTTT. In this
model the Arduino deals with the buzzer the output of the Arduino will always request the buzzer to
produce corresponding sound for the kind of obstacle that is detected by the sensors that are
connected to the Arduino. The other microcontroller Node MCU (ESP 8266) will deal in transmitting
information about fall detection and location this uses SIM 800L and IFTTT in order to send and
receive messages about location and fall detection.
In future we want to include image sensor in our smart shoe for image detection this will help to
identify what obstacle present accurately and will inform him through the speaker that which obstacle
is exactly near him and we want to make the shoe to send the information about fall detection to care
taker along with the ambulance and we also want to enable live location instead of providing location
on request

REFERENCE
1. Alex Yohannan & Shilpa Shyam (2020). Smart Cane for blind and visually Impaired Persons.
2. M. Anisha, S. Kritika, D. Jemimah H, …, C. Jim Elliot (2021) Low cost Smart Shoe for
visually Impaired, Third International Conference
3. Pooja S.Koli & Nikita Sunil Chavan & Shraddha Gajanan Gaikar (2019) Construction of
smart shoe for visually impaired People.
4. https://blog.ted.com/video-haptic-feedback-shoes-guide-blind-walkers/
5. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment
6. https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/science-and-future/blind-people-shoes-tec-
innovation-obstacle-sensor-539927.html
7. K.A. Kupade, Keerti B, ……. Suhas V. Patil (2020). Third Eye for Blind Person using Node
MCU
8. Ayat A. Nada, Mahmoud A. Fakhr, Ahmed F. Seddik (2015) Assistive Infrared Sensor Based
Smart Stick for Blind Person, Sai Conference, London
9. https://www.thebetterindia.com/12631/man-designed-shoe-blind-will-let-navigate-without-
help/
10. Jitendra Singh, Ajay Yadav, Ajay kumar Prajapat (2017). Assistive shoes for visually
Impaired.