The most common aid in assisting the visually-impaired person to move around is the white cane. However, the white cane has limitation in detecting head-level and trunk-level obstacles such as tables and tree branches. In this project, the Smart White Cane (SWC) is proposed. It is a retractable attachment device. It consists of Arduino microcontroller, piezoelectric sensor or buzzer, ultrasonic sensors, motion sensor and vibrating motors. The ultrasonic sensors play the role in detecting obstacles at head-level and trunk-level. At the end of the project, the SWC is built with the ability to detect head-level and trunk-level obstacles within 200 cm and 300 cm, respectively. However, the SWC still has limitations, such as unable to provide different alert outputs for the head-level and trunk-level obstacles, it needs to be lighter in weight and provides faster response time.

Topics
Acoustic sensors, Microcontroller
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