Designing An Interactive Cane For the Visually Impaired

Recent advances in vision technologies are ripe for the development of assistive devices, especially for visually impaired people navigating load and busy environments. In order to increase accessibility and limit the need for outside assistance, this manuscript presents design considerations for a “smart” cane to mitigate the effects of common problems the visually impaired community faces. The integration of vision pipelines like 3D LiDAR and computer vision to identify inconsistencies in the surrounding terrain and relay this information back to the user through auditory means is explored. Technical design requirements were identified and used to evaluate the design of the first prototype of the cane.