fairfolio
Saved Projects

Development of a Mashup That Transforms a Smartphone into an Assisted Vision Aid

CSEF · 2011 Mathematics & Software Honorable_mention Award

Pauline Truong · Gabrielino High School, San Gabriel, Los Angeles County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this project is to (1) develop a smartphone-based mashup that transforms a smartphone into an assisted vision aid and (2) measure its effectiveness. Methods/Materials A prototype was developed and tested using an Android smartphone with gesture recognition, image capture, orientation sensors, text-to-speech software and an image recognition service. Test subjects were taken to an outdoor test environment, blindfolded, guided to a random starting location and orientation, and instructed to identify the location of a given object. Four trials runs using the prototype and four control runs were performed. Success was measured in terms of whether the test subjects could identify the location of the target object within a given time limit of 5 minutes. Results 75% of trial runs with the prototype system were successful while 100% of the control runs failed. The average time it took for test subjects using the prototype to find the target object was 3.02 minutes. Since all control runs failed, the average time of the control runs was the 5.00 minute maximum test time. Conclusions/Discussion This experiment has shown that the sensors available on commonly available smartphones can be integrated with new image recognition services to assist the blind and visually impaired. The degree of assistance (75% success rate) is significant in light of the fact that the control group failed 100% of the time given the same objective of finding a large object in a relatively uncluttered outdoor environment within 5 minutes.

Summary statement

A smartphone-based mashup was developed and tested to serve as an assisted vision aid for the blind and visually impaired.

Help received

My family donated a smartphone for my use. I also received guidance from my teacher, developer blogs and message boards, and open source projects.

Awards (1)

  • Honorable Mention

Competition history

  • CSEF 2011 Mathematics & Software · Entry S1428

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google