Inspiration
Lots of lives are lost in the fire every year. Noticed that people with visual disabilities have difficulties to navigate in an emergency, we decided to improve the current emergency indicating system. We see that most of the buildings have emergency light boxes, so we want to improve that so more people will be safer in an emergency.
What it does
There are two kinds of emergency indicators. The first one will lead you to the emergency exit, the second one will show you the emergency exit. When an emergency happens, public safty department can use smartphones to turn the emergency model on. The first kind of emergency indicator will first tell people where they are by playing a beep sound continuously. When people approach the indicator, it tells people which direction they need to go to by playing different tones with two buzzers. People just need to follow the direction on which side the pitch of the buzzer is higher to find the next indicator or the emergency exit. The second kind of indicator will use sound to tell you where is an emergency exit.
How we built it
For the hardware, we use Arduino 101 (Because we happened to have one Arduino 101 with us and it has build-in BLE) , Arduino Uno, buzzers, Bluetooth modules, ultrasonic sensors to build the project.Every indicator has two buzzers located on different sides of it, an Ultrasonic sensor in the middle, a Bluetooth module to communicate with smartphones. We soldered some of the components, such as buzzers, and used jumper cables to connect to rest. For the software, we use Arduino IDE to develop the programs and test the Bluetooth functions using our smartphones.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge is designing a set of signals that's easy for people to accept. We tried different solutions, but we are not satisfied with most of them because the signals are not intuitive enough and can't give clear instructions. Eventually, we used two buzzers and programmed them to make sounds with different pitches to instruct people where they should go. We tested it with many people and it works well.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
First it is very easy to build one of these indicator and it is very useful. We tested the system with many people, it significantly improves people's performances to find direction with eys folded. What's more, it only takes about fifteen minutes to build one. Second the cost is cheap and the components are very easy to find. We decided to make it easy because we hope it can be easily adapted to the emergency light boxes we have. Also, it would be much cheaper if we use a ATtiny 13 to build the same thing.
What we learned
We didn't decide what to bulid at the beginning. Through the process, we changed many ideas. At the beginning, we were using technologies like Computer Vision and Object Detection, but these technologies didn't help to solve the problem. Rather they cause more problems than the problems solved. Eventually, we focused more on user experience and decided to use a simple solution.
What's next for Emergency Exit Indicator for Visually Disabled People
The next step of this project is to intergrate it with the emergency alert system. We want the fire alarms can also trigger the indicators emergency mode. What's more, we want to do field tests to see if the signal we choose are intuitive enough to indicate people in emergencies. The ultimate goal is to standardize this kind of signal to make the lives of visually disabled people safer.
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