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 guides the user in the same way as a suite of sensors can guide a self-driving car.

The system consists 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 has 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 the 3D camera data. The algorithm first groups the pixels into clusters of three.

 Because the pixels have associated location data, each cluster determines a plane. If the orientations of the planes defined by five nearby clusters are within ten degrees of each other, the system concludes that it has found a surface and begins to buzz the associated motor if the wearer gets within two metres of it.