Vision Mate: An AI Based Mobile Assistive System for Visually Impaired Users

VisionMate is a mobile accessibility application that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and helps visually impaired and blind people to carry out daily tasks independently. The device proposed integrates computer vision, speech recognition, and GPS to utilize the camera, microphone, and location services on a user's smartphone to assist users with a variety of tasks. VisionMate also provides a multitude of functions for people with visual impairments, including Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for reading text, Object Detection for finding people, currency detection for identifying denomination, Barcode Scanning to read product/food labels, and Voice Navigation for providing direction to users via voice command. Uses of cloud services (Google Vision API & Speech-to-Text API) to store incoming images and voice commands allow for the analysis of received images and voice commands. The image results are returned to the user via real-time sound using Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology. VisionMate will be developed using the React Native framework, and MongoDB will serve as the backend database for user management and authentication. Ultimately the goal of the proposed system is to improve access to and independence for visually impaired users by allowing users to better understand the environment using intelligent audio guidance.