Design and Implementation of Microcontroller Based Mobility Aid for Visually Impaired People

This paper presents the design and implementation of Microcontroller Based Mobility aid for visually impaired people. In the world today, about 285 million people are visually impaired. Over the years visually impaired persons have difficulty to interact and feel their environment. They have little contact with their surroundings, and physical movement is a very big challenge to them because it can become tricky to distinguish where he/she is and how to get where he/she wants to go. To navigate to unknown places has to be with individual support. Majority of the blind people in the world are unemployed because of the type of jobs available to them are limited, their mobility opposes them from interacting with people and social activities. This has created very huge concern to people assisting them to walk. This research work aimed at designing mobility aid to the visually impaired persons in order to encourage them to move freely anywhere they want at any time without collision and assistance. The proposed low cost and light weight system is designed with microcontroller that processes signal and alerts the visually impaired person over any obstacle, water or dark areas through beeping sounds. The system consists of special detection sensors, AT89C52 microcontroller for receiving, processing and sending signals to the alarm system which finally alerts the user for prompt action. The system was designed, programmed with assembly language and tested for accuracy and checked by the visually impaired person.