Wearable Virtual Keyboard for Visually Impaired Person

Abstract

Abstract Wearable devices are the future of mobile technology, with all the exciting possibilities they offer in terms of ease of usage, compactness, and the ergonomical aspects of such devices. They provide easy accessibility for not only people seeking easier, faster and flexible ways of communicating information between devices, but also individuals with limited mobility, needing disability assistance and with partial or complete blindness. But for the widespread market of upcoming, new-age technology such as wearables, there aren’t a lot of options supporting outputs on peripherals other than a screens. As possible future prospects of wearable technology can be their use in virtual environments - to ease navigation in a simulated reality, in healthcare to provide more efficient and quick input of patient data while diagnosing diseases and prescribing medicines, and so on. In this paper, we discuss the making and workings of a wearable keyboard glove that can be used as a keyboard after being connected to a mobile device, smartwatch, or laptop. The setup consists of gloves that have Bluetooth, Switches, and flex sensors. The device can be used as a keyboard by using a combination of the results from the Flex Sensors that are mounted on the fingers. The device measures the movement of the fingers, records the gesture, and maps a character to each gesture. The gestures are recognized by measuring the change in resistance of the flex sensors and then converting them to an angle through a scaling formula. These values are then divided into three equal parts using a mapping function. This effectively gives us three different positions for each finger to recognize spread into 4 fingers. Switches are also provided for the thumb fingers to detect its position. This provides us with a theoretical total number of gestures of 162. The said gesture is sent via Bluetooth to the paired smart device.