Problem Statement

EYE-HELPER is a project idea that originated from a survey by an NGO. It made us realize that there are a number of students who are visually impaired and they do not have access to appropriate pre-education and hence they lack a foundation in later stages of their lives. It is also tough to find teachers, enough in number to suffice the needs of these visually impaired children. Hence, we came up with the idea of EYE-HELPER. It includes a 3-D book where students can feel and identify what is written in the book. Parallelly it has braille cards that have answers to what is projected on the book. There is a mobile kept separately to provide audio information. The information is provided to a mobile application through the camera and the machine/mobile will reply with the audio signal for all the given inputs. This will hence enable students to learn and practice even in the absence of a personal teacher.

IMPORTANCE OF THE IDEA:

· In this growing and ever-expanding world one needs to be acquainted with basic education to live life independently.

· One should be educated enough to deal with routine problems. We visited some NGOs and have seen how difficult it is for visually impaired children to learn. The main reason being the lack of teachers or resources.

First of all, the mobile application is opened and the device is kept on a stand with its camera facing towards the book. When the book is opened, the app detects the page and reads out its content which will be followed by a question. The student answers the question by placing one of the cards in a slot provided in the book. The application will reply with a positive/negative response. This is how the student can learn by herself/himself.

This project was built using UNITY. Unity is a game engine which provides users the ability to develop interactive games and applications in both 2D and 3D. It provides C# scripting API in the form of plugins and also provides drag and drop functionality to interact with the 3D environment.

Vuforia is an augmented reality software development kit (SDK) for mobile devices that enables the creation of augmented reality applications. It uses computer vision technology to recognize and track planar images (Image Targets) and simple 3D objects, such as boxes, in real time.

Language: C#

The project was meant to provide a solution to help visually impaired students get the fundamental right to education. It shows how technology can be used to teach physically challenged children without any help from teachers. The proposed solution to this problem will help the kids in getting pre-education which will make them independent and stronger. Taking this product as a medium, we wish to bring a change in the lives of young minds of our nation to help them grow so that their disabilities may not hinder them from achieving their big goals.

(1) Karshmel, A. I., Pontelli, E., & Gupta, G. (1999). ‘ Helping Visually Impaired Students in the Study of Mathematics , (9800209), 8–13.

(3) Soysa, L., Lokuge, K., Wimalasundera, I., & Silva, M. N. De. (2010). Enhancing Learning for Visually Impaired with Technology : MATHVIS, 228–229.

(5) Pawluk, D. T. V, Adams, R. J., Member, S., & Kitada, R. (2015). Designing Haptic Assistive Technology for Individuals Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired, 8(3), 258–278.

(6) Konecki, M., Ivković, N., & Kaniški, M. (2016). Making Programming Education More Accessible for Visually Impaired, 887–890.

(7) Matsuo, M. (2016). ShadowRine : Accessible Game for Blind Users , and Accessible Action RPG for Visually Impaired Gamers, 2826–2827.

(8) Patil, P., & Sonawane, A. (2017). Device For Visually Impaired Individuals, 317–321.

(9) Chen, Y., & Chang, P. (2018). 3D printing assisted in art education : Study on the Effectiveness of Visually Impaired Students in Space Learning. 2018 IEEE International Conference on Applied System Invention (ICASI), 803– 806.

(10) Elkabani, I., & Zantout, R. (n.d.). A Framework for Helping the Visually Impaired Learn and Practice Math.

(12) Joshi, J. S., & Bhatt, M. B. (n.d.). Educational Technologies for People with Special Needs -a Case Study of Blind People ’ s Association , Ahmedabad

Hope you get to read about something new. There are many children who are suffering from this disability. If you have any new idea or any thought which can help us fight this do tell me your views in the comment section. I would be really happy to discuss!

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