Use of Arduino and Ultrasonic Sensors to Design Smart Walking Stick for Visually Impaired People

This paper suggests a smart blind stick that detects obstacle in front of a blind man on street. Arduino and ultrasonic sensor is used to detect the depth below or obstacles in between LED, Buzzer,9V Battery, Jumper wires, a stick. As per the statistics of World Health Organisation (WHO), currently there are 45 million blind people all around the globe. The visually impaired people are very much dependent on external assistance such as humans, trained dogs, or special electronic devices as decision making support systems. Thus, developing a smart stick may overcome these limitations. Ultrasonic sensor is being incorporated at specific position of cane to provide information regarding the environment with the help of buzzer sound. The proposed system is low cost and light weight designed with the help of microcontroller to processes signal and alerts for the visually impaired person over any obstacle, water or dark areas through beeping sounds Obstacle and moisture detection sensors are used for receiving, processing and sending signals to the alarm system and finally alert the user for prompt action. The system was designed, programmed using C language and tested for accuracy and can detect obstacles within the distance of about 2m from the user.