A Wearable Supporting System for Visually Impaired People in Operating Capacitive Touchscreen

We propose a wearable supporting system with a CMOS image sensor for the visually impaired people in operating capacitive touchscreen. This system attaches the CMOS image sensor without a lens to the tip of the middle finger. The icons and buttons displayed on the touchscreen are replaced to the color barcodes. Touching the surface of the touchscreen with the CMOS image sensor directly, the color barcode is detected and decoded. The decoded results are returned to the user by some interaction like audio. Then, the user touches the button area around the color barcode by the forefinger to operate the target device. This system can provide very easy and natural way for operating the touchscreen to the visually impaired people who usually recognize the materials by the finger. Any mechanical modification of the target device is not needed. The modification can be made by changing its software program. Since the color barcode is sensed by the image sensor without any lens touching the surface of the touchscreen, each bar in the color barcode should be blurred. So, we　develop an easy and simple image processing to handle such problem. We design it as the hardware module to achieve the high performance and low-power wearable device. A prototype hardware using an FPGA shows the hardware size, the performance and the actual demonstration.