Saarthi - a smart blind stick and glasses
Hackathon Winner

Inspiration

Our inspiration comes from the desire to improve the mobility and independence of visually impaired individuals by providing them with a more effective and reliable tool for navigation.

What it does

Saarthi is designed to assist people with visual impairments or blindness to navigate their surroundings safely and independently. It does this by incorporating technologies like ultrasonic sensors, cameras, and machine learning algorithms to detect objects and provide audio feedback to the user.

The smart blind stick can detect obstacles such as low-hanging branches, poles, or uneven terrain and provide the user with an audible alert or vibration to help them avoid the obstacle.

Overall, the smart blind stick with object detection aims to provide a more effective and reliable tool for navigation, helping users to move around more confidently and safely and reducing their reliance on assistance from others.

How we built it

Hardware domain -

Smart Blind Stick We have used nodemcu as a primary microcontroller, two ultrasonic sensors to sense the distance from obstacles, and a buzzer and a haptic motor to give feedback to the visually impaired person, and a power source of 5 volts.

Smart Glasses We have used Arduino nano as a microcontroller, an ultrasonic sensor to sense the distance from obstacles, a buzzer, a haptic motor to give feedback to the visually impaired person, and a power source of 9 watts.

Software Domain-

We are using computer vision which is deployed on the server and we are sending the live video feeds to the server in real-time. Using cocossd as a dataset, we have used yolov5 as a machine-learning model for object detection and dictating the object via wireless earpiece.

Challenges we ran into

The most important thing for such a product is being accurate and we can't take risks with a visually impaired person's life. And the most challenging part for us was getting the right accuracy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have won several competitions in the past two months since we have been working on this concept and building this product. And most recently we have won an award for most innovative product in a hackathon. We were appreciated by Mr. Sumeet Mahadra (I.P.S.) Jaipur, Rajasthan.