DRISHTI - Indoor Orientation for Visually Impaired: improving lives through technology

DRISHTI is a wireless indoor orientation system specifically designed for the Visually Impaired (VI), that continuously and in real-time can determine the position of a person from a distance within a confined physical space. We use it to help a VI move around in an unknown and unfamiliar indoor environment (which means that the VI is not oriented, making DRISHTI unique from other Electronic Travel Aids), providing him with the relevant contextual information. DRISHTI does not require any kind of navigational aids like guide canes, guide dogs or wheel chairs to help the VI. The system constantly guides the VI to navigate through auditory cues, issued by the system, based on static and dynamic data collected by the obstacle avoidance system. In this text we integrate several technologies including wearable computers, RFID networks, wireless sensors, voice recognition and synthesis and Bluetooth Technology. The underlying wireless network can either be of RFID tags or Wireless Sensors.

Prashant Gupta and Abhinav Chaturvedi are 2006 graduates from IIT Roorkee, India with a major in Computer Science ∧ Engineering. Prashant has worked with Schlumberger for 4 years and currently works as a professional in the Energy industry. Abhinav is currently pursuing his MBA from Harvard Business School, he has worked with Amazon for 4 years.

Prashant Gupta and Abhinav Chaturvedi are 2006 graduates from IIT Roorkee, India with a major in Computer Science ∧ Engineering. Prashant has worked with Schlumberger for 4 years and currently works as a professional in the Energy industry. Abhinav is currently pursuing his MBA from Harvard Business School, he has worked with Amazon for 4 years.