CHETNA

Inspiration

Vision is the most important part of human perception of the environment. Person with vision impairment is one of the unimaginable situations anyone normal. According to the World Health Organization as of August 2014, there are 39 million people blind and 246 million people on earth with poor vision.

How it works

Mapping of the surrounding is an important aspect for visually impaired people to navigate. We integrated ping sensors and servo motor connected to an Arduino to map a conical area of 60 degrees angle. The area was communicated through systematic auditory cues to the person. This enables the person to understand the surroundings. The arduino sends data to the IPhone through WiFi and Iphone communicates to the person via auditory cues systematically programmed at regular intervals.

Challenges I ran into

It was a difficult task to map the gimbal system to follow a circle. Moreover the determination of depth of a place was a major encounter, for which we have to implement digital low pass filters for accuracy. However we managed to implement a similar but compromising serial delay, we were able to achieve it.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are very proud to contribute the engineering knowledge acquired towards welfare of humanity. This rekindles the passion in our education, as we can see that our engineering skills are for the benefiting an individual. To be more accurate we try to understand the problems that people with disability face and design products and prototype to suit their requirements. Being control system major students we can use the analogy of Feedback control in real-life. The satisfaction earned is just not par with anything else on earth.

What I learned

We importantly learned the difficulty faced by disabled people in their real life. The best part of this experience is to work in a group and develop a prototype and working technology in a stipulated period of time gave an immense hands on experience.

What's next for CHETNA

We want ot integrate a camera with depth sensing capabilities such as project Tango. This can be extended with text real-time text processors and better image processing capable of reading texts and road signs etc.