Electronic Seeing Eye Dog

People living with vision impairment face daily struggles from simple things like navigating in new or changing environments, discrimination or access to basic services that people without disabilities take for granted.

The elderly or those with additional disabilities or other factors that may affect their ability to care for a seeing eye dog are further limited in what services are available to assist them in their everyday lives.

While some improvements have been made to the simple white cane a more robust and total solution is still needed to give vision impaired individuals greater freedom and comfort and assist to reduce or remove the discrimination they may feel on a daily basis.

This project aims to create a real time sensor device that takes the place of a seeing eye dog by monitoring the environment around the wearer, detecting obstacles and providing feedback to the wearer to allow them to move freely through their environment unaided.

The backbone of the project is the Ultra96 development board which will process all inputs and perform pattern recognition to detect the world around the sensors and determine safe direction of movement.