Daily activities and movements of the blind are made easier without the help of typical aids such as a walking stick. Blind peolple usually trip over step. With our technology, a blind person can walk around like an ordinary person and will be able to do it independently. the constant requirement of having to rely on someone else affects blind people on a psychological level, it makes them feel as if their life is a burden for people around them and that they are not capable of doing things on their own.
This leads to depression amongst these people.
Producing a way to provide the spatial information to a person who doesnt have their sense of sight was a large complication we had to overcome in order to complete this project. The human brain uses sight to get a sense of thr surroundings, without eyesight, the brain can't process its surroundings properly. We solved this using the second sense human beings have that has a directional sense and that is the sense of sound. Research shows that blind people have a heightened sense of hearing to compensate for the lack of sight. We used this to our advantage by creating a headband with 5 ultrasonic sensors which feeds the data to a raspberry pi which in turn converts that data to audio signals. We modify that by varying the left and right balance to mimic the effect of surround sound. Thereby depending on the signals sent from the array of ultrasonic sensors we vary the balance of the left and right output to provide the person with information about where an obstacle is by making a sound seem like it is being played from there.
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