Smart Face Shield for Visual and Physical Impaired Person

Smart Face-Shield Health Monitoring For Visual Impaired Person

Inspiration

We get this inspiration from the interview session with visually impaired persons and observation from their pandemic situation. From the observation and interview, we found that they face difficulty performing their regular activity during the pandemic, especially for measuring social distancing range, knowing their own and others body temperature, and other difficulties. Figure 1 showed that the real situation occurred for the visually impaired person in India.

Figure 1: Being blind during the coronavirus pandemic in India. Sources: https://www.dw.com/en/india-being-blind-during-the-coronavirus-pandemic/a-53925776

What it does

Therefore, this project aims to develop a Smart Face Shield System that can perform real-time data collection and analysis to manage the current pandemic and health system, especially for the visual and physical impaired person. This Smart Face Shield System consist of two systems, which are the Smart Security Camera System and Smart Face-Shield. This two system is mainly working on measuring the body temperature and detecting the social distancing automatically, navigating and notifying/alerting the visual impaired person using Smart Face-Shield and Android application, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Overview of Smart Face Shield System for Visual and Physical Impaired Person.

How we built it

This project will integrate Smart Security Camera System and Smart Face-Shield with IoT technology, video and image processing techniques (Camera) and artificial intelligence (AI) system using embedded system design. This system is starting with the video capturing from the camera, video streaming to the server, video processing with AI for alerting based on the AI result (Object detection such as person, tree, and others object), and making a decision on path navigation to guide the visually impaired person. There are also implementing the sensors such as LiDAR to measure the distance between the object.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of this project, the main challenges we faced is in the technical part. In this technical part, several tasks need to pay more attention, such as integration between real-time video and image processing, together with AI. The detection result is satisfied using the data set provided from online sources, but in the real application, the detection result is less satisfied because of the change of environment, especially for the lighting condition during video capturing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In this project, the accomplishments that we are proud of this project were successfully developed by solving the problems of the visual and physical impaired person. During the testing, the tester (visually impaired person) is giving positive feedback to us about this project and also provided some suggestion for project improvement. The example of this project prototype and android application is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Example of Project Prototype and Android Application.

What we learned

In developing this project, we found and learned that there is still someone in this world who suffers from their problems even though the technology is proliferating. As a developer or designer using the technology, we should visit it, experience their problems, think and develop appropriate solutions, gather feedback from other people and improve the solution.