Desenvolvimento de protótipo voltado à substituição da visão através de alertas táteis para deficientes visuais

Abstract

There is no news in stating that a person, after the loose of his vision or even when born without it, may present great problems related to mobility. Alarming indicators published in 2017 by the World Health Organization show us that, due to the global population aging, the number of visually impaired, along with the blind, could triple by 2050. Thus, there is a growing need for the development of electronic systems that act as tools to assist this group. Currently, the simplest and most affordable options are the use of canes and / or trained dogs which, despite their high popularity, are not options capable of providing to those persons with all the information necessary to make their mobility safe. Even though there is a clear demand for technologies aimed at this purpose, the lack of success of previously developed projects opens space for new research to be done, seeking to improve concepts already put forward and present new ones, capable of really becoming applicable and useful to those in need of them. Based on this, comes the proposal of this project, which presents a bibliographic review of some works already developed in the field of aiding the mobility of the visually impaired and, based on methodological and technical information data, develops a prototype for proof-of-concept, by using an array of ultrasonic sensors along with vibrating motors to send tactile alerts to the user, seeking to indicate both position and distance he is from an obstacle in the environment. Subsequently, the results obtained from the practical tests performed with the final prototype are presented and, also, this chapter shows a step dedicated to the statistical modeling of the absolute measurement errors of the sensor model applied, when subjected to an ideal situation for its operation, in order to demonstrate the best performance expected from these sensors. Finally, a general evaluation of the work is done, where are listed the problems encountered, along with solution proposals of improvements to be evaluated in future work.