Novel 360-Degree Camera Based Electronic Travel Aid Dev*

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Among various forms of disability, blindness has been regarded as one of the most devastating handicaps that can strike people of all ages and significantly affect a victim's life. Within the disabled community, more than five million Americans are blind or have severe visual impairment. Each year, around 35,000 adults become blind as a result of accidents, cataracts, glaucoma, diabetes, and other diseases. Among all blind persons, those who need the electronic travel aid (ETA) help most are likely to be the ill-conditioned and/or elderly persons. Currently, no existing electronic travel aids (ETAs) are well-suited for the visual impaired (VI) and/or blind travelers who need to use support devices such as walkers. This special group of VI and blind has special travel needs: They usually need a rolling walker to assist their I orientation and mobility. A rolling walker provides its user with body support during walking, a mobile seat for resting, and a basket for carrying additional items. However, all existing walkers lack of sensing capability to guide its user to navigate safely and quickly among obstacles. To make things worse, with a walker on hands, there is a great level 01' difficulty in using any type of cane simultaneously. Users of rolling walkers have no direct means to obtain any feedback information regarding surrounding obstacles, steps, overhangs, and grade level of the road. Since the use of rolling walker has a large percentage (approximately 45%) over entire blind population, providing additional sensing capability for rolling walker is crucial to increase the mobility of these blind users. The primary objective of the Phase 1 SBIR effort proposed herein is to investigate the feasibility of a novel electronic travel aid (ETA) device called the "OmniWalker". With its unique 180-degree field of view, the OmniWalker will be designed as an compact attachment module mounted on conventional rolling walker to provide spatial sensing capability and obstacle collision warning. It will help blind or visually impaired travelers to navigate safely and quickly- In Phase 1 effort, we plan to build a prototype of the unique sensor head and develop the software for object detection and landmark identification. Hardware experiments will be performed, with the collaboration with a VA Blind Rehabilitation Center, to validate the performance. In the Phase 2 program, we will build a full-bloom version of the prototype with required obstacle detection speed and accuracy. Extensive evaluation tests will be performed by blind patients and O&M instructors and the system design will be improved accordingly. It is important to recognize the tremendous difficulties in developing practical ETA devices and the reasons why there is no such device in existence today. We do not expect to solve all the problems that are in existence for today's ETSs during this SBIR effort. However, this proposed effort will certainly allow some technology oriented companies including GENEX to gain deeper understanding of the requirements of Vls and Blind population, and to explore the possibility of applying the state-of-the-art imaging, electronics, and optics technology into a ETA design to address these pressing needs. It is our hope that by the end of this effort, appropriate set of technologies will be developed technology that will enable better ETA devices.