Designing Assistive Smart Glasses for Sudden Vision Loss: Empowering the Elderly and Technology-Averse Users

Visually impaired individuals, particularly those who have recently lost their sight or struggle to adapt to new technology, face significant challenges in navigating their environment. Conventional aids mostly have no real-time feedback and lack complete spatial awareness, leading to minimal independence and very high risks in unknown environments. To address these challenges, we propose “SmartSight”, an AI-powered wearable device designed to meet diverse needs. SmartVision merges advanced computer vision, Visual SLAM, and deep learning into one real-time assistance system. It features environmental analysis, indoor/outdoor navigation, face detection, social media connectivity, and OCR for reading, with an easy-to-use interface. By leveraging cutting-edge embedded systems and sensor fusion, SmartSight provides immediate, accurate feedback to enhance spatial awareness, independence and safety. This comprehensive solution is designed to be the ultimate assistive tool, which aims at making visually impaired users navigate with full confidence, and independence while bridging the gap between their previous experiences and current challenges.