A New Sense

Helping detecting objects the cane does not reach.

Inspiration

How can we solve a daily challenge for millions of people? In the world, there are 285 million visually impaired individuals. Their most common fears are going out on their own, getting lost and an overall sense of vulnerability. The white cane, the guide dog and voice-controlled apps provide a great help, but have limitations.

This is why we created A New Sense

What it does

A New Sense allows visually impaired people to get an improved understanding of their surroundings through haptic feedback. The device can be worn on the hand as a complement to the white cane to spot objects that would otherwise go unnoticed. It can also be used as a substitute for the cane in places where using a cane would be cumbersome, such as at social gatherings.

How we built it

We used a miniturized Arduino board (Nano) as the logic processor and a SR04 Ultrasonic sensor to receive information on the distance to objects. We stitched these core components together using a prototyping board and some resistors and transistors. We then created an Arduino program using the C/C++ Arduino framework that was able to regulate the intensity of vibration of a small cell-phone motor.

Finally we attached the prototyping board to a platform that could be attached to the hand of a user, similar to a ring.

Challenges we ran into

Our initial goal was to use a customizable PCB board instead of the prototyping board we ended up using. Having that would have allowed for a smaller footprint of the electronics, as well as a thinner design. The reason for why we had to change our plans was that the soldering iron we had turned out to be too powerful, melting the customizable PCB board we had bought.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a feedback function that allows the user to accurately predict how far away objects are with minimal training. This was only possible after a lot of tweaking, and testing.

What we learned

Murphy's laws are to be respected, and expected. The thing you thought would be the main challenge of the project can turn out to be easy to implement, while something seemingly trivial will have you sweating for hours.

What's next for A New sense

The functionality of the current prototype will be minuturized, and the algorithms further refined based on feedback we get from people with visual impairment.