A visually impaired individual loses vision when a part of the eye or the brain that processes images becomes diseased or damaged. Visually impaired people face many problems during their daily activities such as walking around places, identifying objects, identifying people's feelings or emotions, detecting obstacles, etc. Several solutions work around these problems. The area that needs the attention of researchers is helping the visually impaired people in reading the medical reports, a product's name, and a device's reading. To make them independent, this paper proposed a medical assistant “M.A.V.I” which helps a visually impaired person to read medical blood reports, products, normal reports, and LED screens of inaccessible medical devices like a glucose monitor, BP machine, and weighing machine, etc.
TopIntroduction
The importance of vision in our daily lives cannot be underestimated. Vision is used by humans to navigate through highways, find items, and so on. Blind people, on the other hand, are not blessed with vision, which makes life tough for them. The rate of blindness in our society has been steadily rising. According to the survey in the article (Pandey, 2021 ; Pandey, 2021), this number is expected to triple from its current level by 20. As per the World Health Organization report (World, 2022), at least 2.2 billion individuals worldwide will suffer from near or far vision impairment. Vision impairment may have been avoided or managed in at least 1 billion – or nearly half – of these cases. Uncorrected refractive errors and cataracts are the major causes of visual impairment and blindness. The majority of persons who suffer from vision impairment or blindness are over the age of 50; however, vision loss can affect persons of any age. The annual global costs of productivity losses related to visual impairment from untreated myopia and presbyopia are estimated to be US$ 244 billion and US$ 25.4 billion, respectively, due to vision impairment (Ani, 2017).
A visually impaired person faces several obstacles while living their life such as navigation, shopping, identifying objects, streets, products, recognizing human expression etc. Similarly, they face a lot of difficulties when they need to see their medical reports, medical products and devices. Thus, to make smart technological advancements in this regard, this paper is intended to provide a solution by proposing and developing a cross-platform mobile application for visually impaired people, which can help them in reading the medical blood reports, medical product’s name, and digital medical device’s reading. From the proposed application in this article, the visually impaired can easily access and take information written in their medical documents or devices without any help from others. The rear camera will capture images in front of the blind person in real-time after the application is opened. Then with the help of optical character recognition (OCR), the application will identify the object and be able to read it out with the help of text-to-speech (TTS). The application also has a voice assistant to guide the user.
We've seen how the visually impaired encounter obstacles in their daily lives and various assistive technologies based on sensors, IoT, and computer vision have been launched to help blind people. These systems have their advantages and limitations. So, after going through many research papers it has been decided that there is no such work that focuses on medical reports, product’s name and medical devices reading. This paper proposed a medical assistant “M.A.V.I” which would help a visually impaired person to read medical blood reports, product details, normal reports and LED screens of inaccessible medical devices like a glucose monitor, BP machine and weighing machine etc.
The research work of this article is further divided into various sections. Section 2 discusses the work that has already been done in this direction and this section, further, we have materials and methods in section 3 which discuss the technology and system requirements used in this paper. In section 4, we have discussed the proposed work in detail in this research paper. In section 5 we have discussed the implementation of our work. Section 6 discusses the results which are followed by a conclusion and references.