The design of an improved intelligent guide stick for the blind

Abstract There are about 17 million blind people in China, which means that one out of every 80 people is blind. However, due to the lack of facilities and policies to help the blind, many blind people can’t enter some normal places, which brings lots of inconveniences to the blind. In order to make blind people travel more conveniently and safely, this paper designs an improved intelligent guide stick to provide security guide for the blind’s daily travel and their precise location for their guardians. The location data and the images of surroundings were sent to the guardian’s smart phone to help them find the blind especially in a multistory building. In this paper, 10 blind people walked with the help of the improved guide stick in a 3-story building that was divided into 12 different areas. The guardians received text messages and real-time images sent by the guide stick to determine where the blinds were. Finally, 300 groups of data were obtained, among which 282 groups were got when the blind people were successfully located and found, with the successful finding rate of 94%. The experimental results show that with the help of the improved guide stick, the blind can be located more precisely and effectively.