Inspiration
What an imperfect world ours is! Not everyone is lucky enough to be born with a complete human body. We as our team have felt this. The people who face the most difficulties are the BLINDS. They are deprived of the sense of vision and this can cause a lot of hardships in anyone's life. So we actually thought what if technology could help them live a normal life or even a better one? That's it. That was the point that filled us with a motivation to improve someone else's life via technology.
What it does
It's actually like a personal assistant for the blind. Basically we will attach two cameras on each lens of the spectacles and connect it with a single-board computer(Raspberry-Pi or something) and process the images received by the cameras and accomplish the following tasks:-
Blind people are often fooled while paying for something. For instance, If he needs to pay only Rs.10 then he might have given Rs50 and shopkeeper will accept the money saying it's a 10Rs note only. Using our device, he just needs to look at his currency and through an earpiece attached to his ear, the device will whisper the currency which is currently in front of the eyes.
Blind people often hesitate to go out on their own as they might meet with an accident. With our device, while simply walking, whatever he(camera) is seeing will be checked by the program and if there is any danger sign that says "STOP" or "CONSTRUCTION AHEAD" the device will say the appropriate message to the user preventing any accidents. Blinds always need help from others to cross the road. But with our device, we can simply tell the user whether the traffic light is Red or Green light and he can safely cross the road without any help.
Blind people have a hard time talking with anyone in the room. With our device, we can add the family members in the database. Let's say the person is sitting in his/her room and he/she wants to know who is present in the room. So our device will process the live image and tell him about the person who is present in his room. This can greatly reduce the insecurity and hesitation that a blind person faces while approaching to talk to someone present in the room.
Integrating with Google Maps API: So blind people do visit some places daily for instance-temple, yoga club or anything. With our device they just need to select the initial and final location and a proper route will be used. All the turns and steps will be said to the person using the earpiece.
The field of view of human eye is approx. 120 deg. With our device, we can extend it upto 180 deg by attaching lightweight motors beneath the cameras. Blinds can have an extra advantage here. Looking forward, the camera will be able to alert the blind of any incoming vehicle at an angle too(>120 deg) which will decrease the chance of any collision.
How I built it
We haven't actually yet. But we intend to work on this project with great zeal as this will surely improve the lives of millions of Blind people. We will use a camera, a servo motor, a Raspberry Pi(initially) and also some of the Deep Learning libraries like Tensorflow for passing the images to a CNN(Convolutional Neural Network) and predict whatever's in the frame. Also for the database(for storing person's family's name,images), we currently intend to use either a SQL one or Firebase.
Challenges I ran into
We had to brainstorm the plan in such a short interval. So our main challenge was to collect our team, discuss a list of unique ideas, eliminate them one by one till we get the final one. Also to present this whole idea and write it in a lavish manner in order to explain the idea to anyone whosoever reads this, was itself a challenging task owning to shortage of time.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Given that we had less than 24 hours to come up with an idea, this was itself a huge accomplishment for our team. Also we got to know each other through this project as we interacted via chat, voice calls which gave us quite an idea of what teamwork really is.
What I learned
I learnt the importance of team work as each of our team member contributed fully to the project. Also we learnt the importance of innovations in technology as these innovations are bound to help a lot of people around the world. We also learnt a lot about the everyday hardships faced by the blind people and we aim to rectify some of them with our device.
What's next for God's Eye
So if we achieve all the things that we have imagined till now, we will eventually have some support for the deaf too. Like we will add a motor to the person's stick which will vibrate if there is anything dangerous around him/her. So in this way, even the deaf can be benefitted from this device. That's a bit of a long shot but if we do achieve our imaginations, we will surely look into this version too.
Built With
- android-studio
- googe-api
- java
- python
- tensorflow
