Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually-Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions

TLDR

WHO reports 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, including 39 million totally blind, yet most existing assistive systems have limited capabilities. The survey aims to discuss the most significant assistive devices for visually impaired people, highlighting their improvements, advantages, disadvantages, and accuracy. The authors conduct a comparative survey of wearable and portable assistive devices, presenting issues to guide future design of safer, more independent mobility solutions.

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that there are 285 million visuallyimpaired people worldwide. Among these individuals, there are 39 million who are totally blind. There have been several systems designed to support visually-impaired people and to improve the quality of their lives. Unfortunately, most of these systems are limited in their capabilities. In this paper, we present a comparative survey of the wearable and portable assistive devices for visuallyimpaired people in order to show the progress in assistive technology for this group of people. Thus, the contribution of this literature survey is to discuss in detail the most significant devices that are presented in the literature to assist this population and highlight the improvements, advantages, disadvantages, and accuracy. Our aim is to address and present most of the issues of these systems to pave the way for other researchers to design devices that ensure safety and independent mobility to visually-impaired people.