Future technology ( for visually impaired people)

     

Wearable system to help visually impaired navigate

The white cane that visually impaired people frequently use to navigate paths has two major drawbacks: 

one , the obstacles they come in contact with are sometimes other people.

Two, they can't identify certain types of objects, such as tables and chairs, or determine whether a chair is already occupied.

MIT Researchers have developed a new system that guide the user in the same way as a suite of sensors can guide a self- driving car.

The system consist of a 3D camera worn in a pouch hung around the neck , a processing unit that runs the team's proprietary algorithms, a sensor belt , which have five vibrating motors evenly spaced around its forward half, and a reconfigurable Braille interface, which is worn at the user's side.

The system could be used in conjunction with or as an alternative to a cane.

The key to the system is an algorithm for quickly identifying surfaces and their orientations from 3D camera data. The algorithm first groups the pixels into cluster of three . Because the the pixels have associated location data , each cluster determines a plane. If the orientation of the planes defines by five nearby clusters are within ten degree of each other , the system concludes that it has found a surface and begins to buzz the associated motors if the wearer gets into two meters of it 

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