A Guide System for the Blind People Using Bone Conduction Hearing Interface
Chang-Geol Kim, Byung-Seop Song · ITC-CSCC :International Technical Conference on Circuits Systems, Computers and Communications · 2007
For blind people or visually impaired, a walking-guide system is investigated and designed. To find out the obstacle in the road, ultrasonic sensors module is equiped and the acoustic signal interface is employed for notifying the obstacle information to the user. As an acoustic signal transfer method, the bone conduction (BC) stimulation is used in order to avoid interference occurring by the alarm sound and environmental sound. For easy user understanding about the obstacle information, the front direction of user is divided to ten sectors and the system notifies the user to the sector in which the closest obstacle located. As a controller, the system has a microprocessor and a PDA. All of the information about obstacle in front of user is checked by sensor module and delivered to the microprocessor which analyzes it and generates the acoustic signal for alarm. In addition to the alarm signal, the system provides the user with guide voice using the PDA which has a text-to-speech (TTS) program for easy and safe guidance. Considering the blind’s psychological inclination to hide their disability, the wearable type of system was designed and almost of the system are concealed in the clothes. According to the design concept, a prototype of the system was implemented and some experiments were carried out.