Helmet for Blind(HALO)-haptic Assitted Locating of Obstracle

To navigate blind
people freely without the use of a guide or a stick.

Haptic assisted
locating of obstacles is a model helmet for blind people to navigate freely without the use of a guide dog or cane.

HALO consist of series of rangefinders that would take input from sensors and output feedback to pulse vibration motors placed on a person’s head. If a region was lacking feedback, then it would be safe to proceed in that direction.

There are three rangefinders which uses ultrasonic waves to detect an obstacle.

The Module automatically sends eight 40 kHz and detect whether there is a pulse signal back.

IF the signal back, through high level , time of high output IO duration is the time from sending ultrasonic to returning. Test distance = (high level time × velocity of sound (340M/S)/2.

Microcontroller used in this project is an open source programmable device which provides integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Processing project, which includes support for the C and C++ programming languages.

Three vibrating motors are placed and connected to the microcontroller through jumper cables

The distance obtained from three different range finders are fed to the microcontroller and when the obstacle is within 75 cms, digital signal from the microcontroller is sent to the corresponding vibrating motors which gives an haptic feedback to the user. When there is no obstacle there is no feedback from the vibrating motors and thus it would be safe to proceed in that direction