Building a Portable Talking Medicine Reminder for Visually Impaired Persons

摘要

Assistive systems can help improving the ability of disabled persons in taking care of themselves. There are more than 39 million visually impaired persons in the world, and moreover, the amount is increasing year by year. Therefore, Developing assistive systems for the visually impaired persons is an important issue. Since the medication guides are often too complex for visually impaired persons, it makes The visually impaired persons frequently forgetting to take drugs or being wrong in medication. In this work, we are going to develop a portable talking medicine reminding system to assist visually impaired persons in medication and reduce the number of medication errors. The assistive system will mainly provide auditory feedback in operation, and braille output for special needs. The assistive system will also provide a user-friendly interface that is specifically designed for visually impaired persons and is compatible with common-used screenreaders. The assistive system identifies drugs based on the now relatively common barcodes on drug begs. In addition, to overcome the problem that it is difficult for visually impaired persons to scan the barcode horizontally or vertically, an omni-directional barcode recognition technology will be used in the assistive system. It will make the assistive system easier for visually impaired persons to use. The assistive system will be built on a handheld device for better portability so that it can assist visually impaired persons anytime and anywhere, and reduce the number of medication errors. The system will be suitable to be used in the applications of ubiquitous health-care.