Interactive wallet for visually impaired people

Abstract

There are more than 39 million people in the world who are blind. In the majority of cases blindness is caused by conditions that are preventable. Many of the people sufferers live in remote areas with little or no access to services and treatment. Asian countries such as Sri Lanka are increasingly implementing the latest technology and developing challenging projects especially for differently abled people. Now-a-days there are millions of people who have mobile devices with the latest applications installed on it, which are helping them with day to day life. But compared with developed countries, there are fewer applications for differently abled people in developing countries; particularly because of a lack of technology and the resources available for differently abled people. Social media is going from a “nice to have” to an essential part of every body’s life. The aim of the project is to give the experience which others having also to the differently abled people. This application has integration of the social media. New technologies such as Augmented Reality, Near Field Communication (NFC), and voice recognition, are used to develop effective and efficient applications. In 2003 NFC introduced smart cards that are capable of storing data securely and designed to perform more secure, offline transactions without any requirement to contact a backend server. These are becoming more popular in Sri Lanka as well as in other countries. Augmented Reality can be used, so that a Visually Impaired Person can obtain more information from a person standing in front of him or her using a phone. Voice to Text (Speech recognition) is also applied in this app, because the main difficulty for the visually impaired person is ‘reading a text’ or on-screen instructions. SMS and various instructions can be reading using this technology for the visually impaired person. Barcode readers can also play a major role in item recognition and Google APIs, (Add geotags in Picasa, Google, 2014) Facebook SDKs, and Braintree SDKs and APIs also have major impact in the app development. v This combination of various technologies mentioned above is used to create an attractive solution. Features which are not implemented are also mentioned. Sequences diagram and Data Flow Diagrams helped to implement the software. Admin portal of the application implemented as website and could be able to access by authorised person. It helps to add items for recognition, and returns required details. This helps to show this prototype level applications works. Some part of the admin panel indicates the real time data from the shop/retailers sites. According to the observation and study more than half of the Visually Impaired Seniors also has a Hearing Impairment. This application is having a unique feature which will help to read SMS/news using Morse code technology. This integration will take the big part in future development. Voice to Text, Text to Voice feature takes the big part of this application, but morse code will replace this and will be useful for the visually impaired people with hearing aid problem. Combination of different technologies with appropriate integration will help to create the successful application. This application also has the much different integration, such as GPS, NFC, Morse code, Speech recognition, etc. The mobile solution has been tested by 20 selected users with visual impaired. They were each given a mobile phone with enabled required features. This application indicates how clients satisfy with the features and how it will help in their day to day activities is done using evaluation. Participants were asked to complete questionnaire a take part in formal interviews to indicate how satisfies they were with features and how helpful the application was. The results show that the solution produces a 60% accuracy rate, with many features showing in prototype level