Final Year Project Synopsis

Visual impairment is the significant limitation of visual capability which cannot be corrected or improved by conventional means. It severely hampers everyday tasks and limits the sufferers independence. Extensive research is being conducted in designing systems that can assist and aid a visually impaired person. Although breakthroughs have been made and new applications have been introduced, most of them are very expensive and costly. The price of such systems is rightly justified as the components used in them are very sophisticated and pricey. Therefore, a need arises for a practical system that is economical and can facilitate the visually challenged person while keeping the complexity of the application to a minimum.

The main objective of our final year project is to design a low cost, easy to operate system that can correctly interpret and identify hand movements such as tapping. These gestures will then be processed in the microcontroller and the corresponding output interfaced with the desired appliance wirelessly. Keeping in mind the cost, a stethoscope will be used as a detecting surface instead of a touchpad. This is a newer, innovative approach which will greatly reduce the cost factor involved. Implementation in the hardware will have to be made accordingly as the sound generated by tapping on a stethoscope will be attenuated and not in a form that can be recognized by the microcontroller. The microcontroller will be programmed to differentiate between specific tapping movements and pass on their correlative outputs to the appliance via an RF module.