Wearable Object Detection System for the Blind Alessandro Dionisi, Emilio Sardini, Mauro Serpelloni Dept. of Information Engineering University of Brescia Brescia, Italy mauro.serpelloni@ing.unibs.it Abstract— 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. Keywords – wearable system; health care; movement monitoring; biomedical devices; system health; RFID; RSSI. I. INTRODUCTION The spread of visual impairment is a very sensitive issue worldwide. Blind people have to play in the everyday actions of different difficulty. These include the difficulty of moving in complete autonomy and the ability to seek and recognize objects. Until a decade ago, the only aid that a blind person has used are sticks, guide dogs accompanying persons or to move, while the technique of reading Braille is used for collecting information about objects. Braille is very useful for identifying objects and transposes information but it remains a technique limited by the high rate of illiteracy in the present population of the blind. In the last decade, electronic devices have been introduced into the world of the blind in order to facilitate the lives of these people. The RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has provided a greater improvement in the welfare of a blind person. This technique has shown good premises and is the number one candidate to replace the old technical supports. In the literature, there are several devices to help people who are blind or visually impaired based on RFID technology. In [1], a device for the blind is presented. It can play music and record voice messages. In addition to the typical functions, these devices can be read by a RFID tag reader integrated operating at a frequency of 13.56 MHz. The scientific consensus has been achieved different RFID devices that help blind people in both movements (SESAMONET system, and the system vibrotactile BIGS) and in the organization of objects (such as Iglove and Glideo) [2, 3]. In [4], it is reported a solution for providing support to the blind using mobile museum guides by exploiting the haptic channel as a complement to the audio/vocal one. The overall goal is to improve the autonomy and social integration of blind visitors. The solution includes vibrotactile feedback enhancement for orientation and obstacle avoidance obtained through the use of unobtrusive actuators applied to two of the user’s fingers that are combined with an electronic compass and obstacle detector sensors connected wirelessly to the mobile guide. GLIDEO in [3] is a different solution for providing blind users with audio information about RFID-tagged objects in their surroundings. The RFID reader is embedded in a glove to let the user freely explore the area. The information is sent via Bluetooth to a PDA. The PDA transmits via audio information obtained by the reader RFID. In most cases reported in the literature [5], the devices that facilitate the movement of people who are blind are made of sticks with integrated RFID reader that can read tags located in the external environment. While the organization of the objects is made of gloves that can detect the presence of tags applied to objects. Even in this case the UID received from the tag is associated with its description obtained from an external database. The operating frequencies used by these devices are several: magnetic coupling is used for the frequency at 13.56 MHz and 800-900 MHz frequencies are used for electromagnetic coupling. In this paper, a device to help blind people is described, the designed wearable device is able to detect the presence of objects labeled with the appropriate RFID tag in a home environment, as the medicine cabinet, and provide the user information through a beep away. With respect to the previous works, our designed device is able to find autonomously labeled objects by means of a single reader without any bonds, such as the use of other RFID readers. Furthermore, the RFID reader algorithm is based on RSSI signal to seek and to identify the RFID tag applied on the object to identify. The complete project work and developed 978-1-4577-1772-7/12/$26.00 ©2012 IEEE