Specto

In our world today, there are many people who face a disability of sight and hearing. People with these disabilities are not able to communicate and interact with others, like us, who are fortunate to live normal lives without having to face a challenge on a daily basis.

People with hearing loss face difficulties when it comes to public announcements, job interviews, misunderstandings of sign language, and suffering from depression/anxiety. Some kids even get bullied at school just for being deaf. Envision yourself sitting in a crowded building when all of a sudden the fire alarm goes off; you can’t hear anything and everyone around you seems to be running for their lives. The only chance of survival depends on someone else.

Loss of sight is another major difficulty people face. The biggest challenge for a blind person, especially one with the complete loss of vision, is to navigate around places. Imagine waking up one day and walking into a random object without any warning, or a situation where you need to cross the street, but you can’t see the any signs. All of these are challenges blind people face everyday, but their main source of help is a cane.

The problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better either. The graphs below show an increase in growth of blind people and deaf people up till the year 2050.

94% Increase 92% Increase

Even with the help of current day devices such as a cane, the braille system, and hearing aids there are still many struggles these people face. The cane simply just acts as a guiding stick and doesn’t help to identify any object in front of the person. The hearing aids, only acts as aid and may not give you the entire message. Lastly, the braille system is only read by 10% of the blind population.

Although, there is no direct solution to regaining your hearing and sight, there are always ways to make a person’s life easier, and also reduce the amount of struggles they go through. To help people live their lives with less challenges, we designed two different products which can easily be attached to a pair of glasses. They can help people who suffer from hearing loss and vision loss.

Our first product, aimed to help blind people navigate themselves, is meant to use audio to warn the blind about objects around them. This will help them get around their everyday routines, whether it is walking down the street or simply getting around the house in the morning.

Our second product, is meant to use audio to text software to inform the deaf of the things going around them. This can help deaf people function easier, and can also enable them to get jobs that they were not able to get in the past, like corporate and software positions.

• Infared Sensor
• Bose Frames
• Raspberry Pi
• Google API Vision
• LCD Display
• Pi Camera

Listed above are some of the main components we used in order to make this project.

More Info On Parts

Updated Project Video

This video is a walkthrough of our entire project!

Watch The Original Video

Hardware Walkthrough Video

Blind Feature

Watch The Original Video

Deaf Component

Use of an audio to text software to inform the deaf of the things going around them.

Watch The Original Video

Desk

General

Name: Ishaan Bansal

The main benefit with our project is being able to use parts which are at a cheap cost and very portable.

Blind Glasses

• Infared Sensor - Used to measure infrared light radiating from objects in its field of view. Our sensor can detect object within a range of 5ft.

• Google Vision API - Allows us to easily integrate vision detection features within our Raspberry Pi. The API includes useful features such as image labeling and optical character recognition.

• Pi Camera - Our main camera on the Bose frames is to identify the object in front of the blind person, by using the Google Vision API. The camera intakes a snapshot of anything in a 5ft proximity.

• Bose Frames - The main frame for the product, which also contains a speaker on the sides, to give the user a warning of the things in front of them. Ex. “WARNING table ahead”. Additionally, if there is text in front of the user it would turn that text to speech so the blind user could understand.

Deaf Component

• Bose Frames - Uses the onboard mic to take speech input from the person talking.

• LCD Display - The main display to provide the user a text transcript of the conversation. Since deaf people can’t hear, we display them text.

There are a lot of features and improvements we have planned to do in the near feature. Some of them include:

• Improving Hardware Component with 3D Printed mounting brackets
• Improving Blind Feature Image to Audio by adding it to glasses with voice command
• Improving Deaf Component by adding it to glasses
• Improbing Deaf Component by building call and text support

For the future, we plan to create more products that help people with disabilities. Some of the smartest people in the world have had some form of disabilities, like Stephen Hawking Helen Keller, Harriet Tubman, and even Galileo. Our team believes that if we come up with more ideas to assist the disabled, we can hopefully help the impaired work as regular citizens, and even find more prodigies.

Meet The Team

Agrim Dhingra Ishaan Bansal Samarth Shah Shanay Champaneri Sahil Tallam