An IoT-Based Smart Cane for Blind Individuals with Emergency Alert System

Abstract

Blindness continues to limit the safety and mobility of many individuals. Traditional White canes can help people navigate space; however‚ they do not provide real-time monitoring‚ emergency alert‚ or environmental detection․ This study carried out the design‚ development‚ and testing of an IoT-based Smart Cane with obstacle and water detection‚ GPS-based location monitoring‚ SOS emergency alert‚ and Multilingual Voice Assistance for Blind Individuals․ The Spiral model was used for this study as a research design․ The prototype was implemented with an ESP32 microcontroller‚ sensors‚ GPS module‚ Firebase Realtime Database‚ and Apache Cordova framework for the Guardian Monitoring Application․ Purposive and snowball sampling methods were used for the sampling of blind respondents‚ guardians‚ and non-blind respondents from the province of Lanao del Norte in Mindanao region․ The IoT-Based Smart Cane was evaluated using USE Questionnaires and the ISO/IEC 25010 system quality using the Five-Point Likert Scale‚ the Smart Cane was found to have the ability to detect obstacles and wet surfaces‚ send SOS emergency alert notification‚ provide real time GPS location‚ and deliver multilingual voice assistance and vibration feedbacks․ Overall‚ results showed high satisfaction ratings for usability‚ functionality‚ accuracy and effectiveness of the system‚ and showed that merging IoT and assistive material into a single assistive device improved safety‚ navigation and mobility of blind individuals․