Mechatronic System to Help Visually Impaired Users During Walking and Running

Ambient assisted living and intelligent transportation systems are becoming strongly coupled. There is the necessity of improving the quality of life by developing inclusive mobility solutions for impaired people. In this paper, we focus on a monocular vision-based system to assist people during walking, jogging, and running in outdoor environments. The impaired user is guided along a path represented by a lane or line on a dedicated runway. We developed a set of image processing algorithms to extract lines/lanes to follow. The embedded system is based on a small camera and a board that is responsible for processing the images and communicating with the developed haptic device. The haptic device is formed by a set of two gloves equipped with vibration motors that drive the user to the right direction. The vibration sequences are generated according to a robotic-like controller, considering the user as a two wheel steering robot, where the rotational and translation velocity can be controlled. The results obtained show that the overall system is able to detect the right path and to provide the right stimuli to the user, by means of the gloves, up to a speed over 10 km/h.