K.S.R.

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Department of
ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

Paper presentation on
TACTILE SYSTEM FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE USING EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY

Submitted by K.K.VINOTH,(THIRD ECE)(8015203566) R.SHASHANK,(THIRD ECE)(9360330001)

Function of Tactile system using Embedded technology Use of vibroactuator in tactile device Combination of hardware and software ATMEL microcontroller Embedded C

SYNOPSIS:
Introduction

Modes of vibrator activation Applications of Tactile system

For visually impaired people

INTRODUCTION:
Embedded systems are omnipresent. It is defined as a computing device that as a specific focused job. It consist of both hardware and software. The hardware components are controlled by using software. There are a several appliances such as VCD player, DVD player, printer, Fax machine, mobile phone etc., Each of these appliances will have a processor and special hardware to meet the specific requirement of the application along with the embedded software that is executed by the processor for meeting that specific requirement. The embedded software is also called firmware. Here we are applying the embedded technology in tactile system used for guiding the blind on direction of a walk.

Other applications of Embedded system Conclusions Reference

ABSTRACT:
The visually impaired persons or blind peoples are mostly depend on others to travel from one place to other. There are different systems used for informing blind persons on direction of their movement in urban areas. Most navigation systems devoted for guiding the blind people are voice based one. But the voice information is not reliable due to high noise produced by heavy traffic in urban areas. Its significantly reduces perception of commands generated by earphones used by the blind person. This paper presents the design of vibrotactile method used to guide a visually impaired person in urban areas. It is very simple and effective method. It consists of two vibrators which is placed on the left and right arms of their shoulder which produce vibrations by means of haptic perception , especially developed by controlled hardware and software.By this tactile perception eventhough the blind person is in heavy traffic they can easily identify the safe direction on a walk. This tactile system mainly overcomes the disadvantages of voice based system.

FUNCTION OF TACTILE SYSTEM USING EMBEDDED TECHNOLOGY: The tactile system uses the tactile device which is a mechanical instrument that make use of touch to help individuals who have certain disabilities such as deaf-blindness to guide on direction of a walk. Tactile system is using three principal parts: A first one is an information provider it is system responsible for recognition of spatial localization and Geographical Positioning Systems equipped with an electronic compass are used commonly.

A second part undertakes decisions and commonly it is a computer and specially developed software. It calculates the direction of anticipated movement basing on information obtained form the first block and build-in knowledge base. It may contain maps and possible safe trajectories. A third block is responsible for passing to the blind person information on suggested direction of movement. We are investigating the possibility of use of the haptic perception for delivering appropriate information. The term haptic perception refers to tactual perception in which both the cutaneous and the kinesthetic senses convey important information about distal objects and events.

information using skin sensation requires relaying compressed information via either a hearing-intact intermediary or a speech-to-tactile transduction device. This paper describes an experimental device for the transmission of direction of the walking information by means of vibrotactile stimulation. Haptic based devices are widely used nowadays. Majority of them are hidden in almost every GSM phone giving possibility to answer the call without disturbing other people.

USE OF VIBROACTUATOR IN TACTILE DEVICE:

The vibrotactile actuators should be small sized, low powered and giving recognizable vibrations.This actuators enabling the amplitude regulation and wide frequency of vibrations were large and equipped with a heavy and strong permanent magnet.

Fig: vibrotactile vibrators Fig : Tactile device Tactile device produces the cutaneous sense refers to the awareness of stimulus of the outer surface of the skin. It is due to stimulation receptors within the skin and the associated nerve system. A mechanical stimulus applied to the skin is temporally and spatially processed. Therefore, the transmission of They are based on small DC motors with unbalanced load attached to the rotors shaft. However, there is no possibility to control the frequency and the amplitude of vibrations. On the other hand these vibrators are characterized by low power consumption thus, giving an opportunity of manufacturing of a battery powered

device.The vibroactuator consists of a small DC motor closed in a plastic case. One side of the case is adhesive plane. It allows the vibrator to be attached to the belt.

Fig: actuator circuit design Haptic and vibrotactile devices are of great importance regarding the blind people. They are used even for graphical information representation. Vibrotactile devices can be also useful tool for attain drivers attention in the traffic. The main target is to develop a method delivering information to the blind using the vibrotactile systems.

COMBINATION OF HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE:

HARDWARE: The controlling unit is built using microcontroller ATMega48 (Atmel).

The microcontroller can drive up to four vibroactuators (in the presented study only two of them were used). The drivers are built from the Darlington pair of the NPN transistors. The vibrator control algorithm is stored in the microcontroller memory. Because the amplitude and the frequency of vibrations are fixed by producer another method of vibration control was developed. The vibroactuator can be in one of two states: o ON o OFF

Each vibrator could be turned on for the period TON and then turned off for the period TOFF and this could be repeated for N times. Tdelay is the delay time between vibrators. Time can be programmed with 10ms resolution and is a 16-bit value where N is 8-bit value. Tdelay Ton Toff and N could be programmed individually for each vibrator via serial interface. Separate command is used for sending sequence parameters to each vibrator. Parameters are stored in microcontroller memory and the same sequence can be used many times. Objective examination of touch sense has been performed with use of the ordinary EEG system. The EEG system used was able to perform evoked potential study using a stroboscope lamp.

As the EEG system was continuously used in clinical practice it was necessary to develop the vibrator driver optically triggered. Every stroboscope flash triggers the vibrator for arbitrary selected period. The period of 500 ms was used.

SOFTWARE: In order to examine recognition of the commands sent thru vibrators a dedicated game has been developed. To reduce amount of information to remember only three states have been chosen: o GO STRAIGHT o TURN LEFT o TURN RIGHT PC program can load the initial settings of the vibrators and store it in the microcontrollers memory. Computer is randomly selecting one of the state,

sends it to the microcontroller and initiate single vibration scheme. Examined person has two vibrators attached to the left arm above elbow. In response to a pattern of vibrations the examined person resolves the command. All data, including the response have been stored in the form of list that could be saved as text file. Analysis of the answers in relation to the command can be done using any other software.

MODES OF ACTIVATION:

VIBRATOR

Experimental stand consisted of laptop and custom made electronics circuit controlling the vibrators . The vibrators were attached to the arm using a belt.

Vibrators can be activated using multiple of scenarios. Information can be transmitted by using one to four vibrators, that can work simultaneously giving large number of possibilities. In mobile devices the power demand of the device is important. To reduce the power consumption usage of two vibrators is considered. Two modes of vibrator excitation were, among others, used in the study. To code of the commands the time delay between vibrator V1 and V2 was selected. Two vibrators running simultaneously were describing the forward command. For left direction the vibrator V1 was energized earlier than V2. For a right direction opposite pattern was used. Parameters for two arbitrary selected schemes are collected in table 1 and table 2. The collected parameters differs in delay time between pulses and in number of pulses per communicate.

Averaging 80 electroencephalographic waves shows that stimulation is really influencing recorded EEGs.Moreover, it is visible in the expected regions of brain (somatosensoric ones). Results obtained from the subjective examination are presented in Fig. 9 and 10 respectively. Figures are presenting results of recognition of three different commands using two exemplary stimulus coding protocols. Data were compared for blind and normal subject. Each examination took at least 100 questions without feedback from the system. From the presented data it is visible that the first pattern (Table 1) was more effective, much less of errors were recorded.

REFERENCES: BIBLIOGRAPHY:
A. Toney, L. Dunne, B. Thomas and S. P. Ashdown, A shoulder pad insert vibrotactile display In Deeber Azada, editor, Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, pages 35-44, White Plains, New York, 2003.IEEE Computer Society K. Kaczmarek, J. Webster, P. Bach-y-Rita, and W. Tompkins.Electrotacile and vibrotactile displays for sensory substitution systems, IEEE Transaction on Biomedical Engineering, volume 38, pages 1-16, 1991

Fig. 10. Result of normal patient examinations a) a first pattern, and b) second pattern.

WEBLIOGRAPHY:
www.ieeexplore.ieee.org www.pdfdatabase.com www.google.com

CONCLUSION:
A simple and reliable tactile system consisting of two vibrators which is place on the left and right arm of shoulder which produce vibrations by means of haptic perception has been developed. It enables for the user optimal selection of vibration parameters for signaling direction of movement. This paper has shown that the blind person was more sensitive and accurate in recognizing the patterns of vibrations. In order to find optimal excitation pattern and number of vibroactuators to be used in order to assure the best differentiation between commands.