Technical Review of Smart Assistive Devices for Visually Impaired People

Ever since the emergence of new technologies such as computer vision and machine learning, we have encountered many developments in the field of designing a low-cost user-friendly device to assist visually impaired people. Research on this area of concern has been encouraged by several renowned institutions.Typically, these assistive devices have ultrasonic sensor, IR sensor or a camera sensor or a combination of these. They acquire the information from the surrounding and pass it onto the microcontroller. It processes the information through the machine learning algorithm and provides feedback to the user. This feedback might be haptic, or a voice generated output. This paper reviews the different methods and technologies used to design the unique assistive devices. The methods are compared based on their functionality. The technologies used in various devices are thoroughly reviewed.