[vip_students] Student Project Update.
- From: "Francis Kane" <Francis.Kane@xxxxxxx>
- To: vip_students@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:02:07 +0000
Hi all,
Just a follow up to you all in relation to the system being designed by
students in engineering in N U I Galway to alert people to open doors etc.
in their homes. Thanks again to all who kindly contributed in any way
through email and phone calls, it was all invaluable to the students and
having seen a working prototype of the system last week hopefully they can
get a full working model developed. Below is a summary of the project and
what they have developed. Considering that this is just one part of a very
busy year in college I'm sure you'll agree it's an excellent piece of work
and hopefully they can push on and develop something very worthwhile from
it.
Thanks again to everyone,
Francis.
"HomeSense" - a home safety system for the blind.
Having spoken to Francis Kane, a representative for the NCBI Galway
branch, we were informed that recently, a blind person had an incident in
his kitchen where a visitor had left the dishwasher door open which he
subsequently tripped over, sustaining serious injuries. Upon further
investigation it became apparent that this is not an isolated incident and
that many people have experienced this problem. This is an issue visually
impaired people face which we felt needed to be addressed, especially in
people who have become blind later in life and would not necessarily have
the spatial awareness to find their way around their house safely.
Our solution involved attaching sensors to all doors and relevant
appliances in the users home, creating a sensor network. When any door is
open, this information is sent to a main base unit at the entrance to the
room.
Upon entering the room, this information is sent to an Android application
which warns the blind user if any potential hazards are present using TTS
(Text-to-speech). The user may also interact with the application using
voice recognition to ascertain if there are any current safety risks.
Should the user not have a phone in their possession, or if blind visitors
are in the home, a backup system is in place in which the base unit itself
can announce these hazards. HomeSense utilises ultra-low-power TI MSP430
microcontrollers with proprietary RF transceivers for wireless
communications and connects to the Android application via Bluetooth.
Systems are also in place to deal with power outages, low batteries,
sensor faults or phone hardware issues.
The application connects to the base unit via Bluetooth . Once the
visually impaired user enters the room, a packet containing the sensor
network data is sent to the phone. The acquired information is then used
to populate an SQLite database. From here TTS is utilised to announce any
potential hazards, if a sensor battery is low or if the network has any
faults. The user also has the option of using voice recognition using the
Google Voice search speech recogniser to find out which sensors are active
without needing to navigate through the application visually.
As the end user is visually impaired, the user interface minimal and the
Android operating system allows the application to be run as a background
process. The visual user interface itself is only for system
configuration purposes such as the ability to change sensor locations,
view the current status of the network and send commands to the base unit
to configure embedded system settings.
We are also working on developing a website which allows the status of the
network to be accessible online.
This would make it possible to integrate the system with emergency to
cater for injuries, or to contact carers in the event of an incident.
We're also investigating the possibility of using NFC (near field
communication) to allow the application to be expanded for use in public
services such as in bus stations, schools and libraries to give the
visually impaired any information they should be aware of.
Follow us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ncbiworkingforpeoplewithsightloss
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ncbi_sightloss
Check-out NCBI's Micheal O Muircheartaigh appeal on the following link.
http://youtu.be/25P2tiuCi0U
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