Wearable object detection system for the blind

The blind's capacities to navigate in a particular place and to organize their daily activities are of vital importance for their health and well-being. Organizing any kind of simple daily activity can be especially difficult; it is not easy for the blind to distinguish the different items, such as packaged foods and drug containers just by touching with their hands. RFID, or radio frequency identification, is a technology that can provide a support for improving the organization and orientation during the daylight activities. RFID uses radio waves to deliver data from a tag, which stores information, to a reader, which can elaborate the information making decisions. This technology is very useful in many different contexts such as scanning passports, shipments and automatic highway toll collecting. As the RFID technology stands out for its inherent technical nature of any basic RFID system, it may involve additional improvements for numerous applications in the field of health care. In this paper, a RFID device designed as a support for the blind in searching some objects is presented; in particular, it has been develop for searching the medicines in a cabinet at home. The device is able to provide to the blind some pieces of information about the distance and simplify the search; besides identifying the medicines, the device is able to provide the user an acoustic signal in order to find easily the desired product as soon as possible. It is noteworthy the fact that it gives the blind some items of information about the distance of a defined object, that is how near or far it is. This application is obtained using the RSSI (Received Strength Signal Indicator) value, measuring the power of the received signal of the tag.