Abhinav Chaturvedi

Drishti - Indoor Orientation for Visually Impaired: Improving Lives Through Technology Abhinav Chaturvedi

DRISHTI is a wireless indoor orientation system specifically designed for the Visually Impaired (VI), that continuously and in real-time can determine the position of a person from a distance within a confined physical space. We use it to help a VI move around in an unknown and unfamiliar indoor environment (which means that the VI is not oriented, making DRISHTI unique from other Electronic Travel Aids), providing him with the relevant contextual information. DRISHTI does not require any kind of navigational aids like guide canes, guide dogs or wheel chairs to help the VI. The system constantly guides the VI to navigate through auditory cues, issued by the system, based on static and dynamic data collected by the obstacle avoidance system. In this text we integrate several technologies including wearable computers, RFID networks, wireless sensors, voice recognition and synthesis and Bluetooth Technology. The underlying wireless network can either be of RFID tags or Wireless Sensors.