Shopping

Assistance System
for Blind
Customers
Project ID: SLIIT/CTP/2014/12

Our Vision..
Bring the visually impaired
customers to Super Market
shopping culture..

Introduction
Why Vision impaired customer
assistance system?
Estimated statistics reveal that
285 million people are visually
impaired and out of this number,
39 million people are totally
blind

Shopping behavior analysis

Function Name

Function Description

F1

Shopping list preparation

F2

Getting to super market

F3

Finding products in store

F4

Getting to cash registers

F5

Paying

F6

Getting to exit

F7

Getting home

Our solution
Integration of Three systems
-Navigation System
This function involves identifying the correct good shelves that the
customer need, by comparing the shelfs ID number with customer
inputs. The ID is given to each shelf using RFIDs. The RFID is captured
by a RFID reader and that information is possessed by a mobile
application, for further comparison. Depending on the position of a
customer the system will deliver the relevant shelf name as a voice
recording to customer.

Item selecting
Soon after the customer receives the message that he is
passing the correct shelf, he should stop and start selecting.
For reading purpose the customer is given hand held RFID
reader. Thus as mentioned in earlier function, each good is
uniquely identified by a RFID chip and a recording will be
played, uttering goods name each time customer reader the
ID from reader.
Collision detecting System
During the navigation period the customer is who control the
navigation path of cart depending on the audible instructions.
Thus there should be a way to identify barriers in front of the
cart. We intended that again best way to solve this, is to let
the customer to know about the barrier in front of him using a

Background
-We found out several attempts on
this issue.
RoboCart

RoboCart was our first accessible blind shopping

project that started in early 2004 [1] at the
Computer Science Assistive Technology
Laboratory of Utah State University (USU CSATL).
The objective was to design a robotic supermarket
shopping assistant for blind shoppers. A long-term
collaborative agreement was negotiated with
Lee's Market Place to grant us access to its
supermarket in Logan, Utah for experimental
purposes.

GroZi
GroZi is an accessible shopping project at UC San Diego
: 1) an accessible web site for blind and VI users to create grocery
shopping lists in the comfort of their homes; 2) computer vision
software for recognizing products and signs in stores; and 3)
portable devices that can execute computer vision algorithms and
give the user haptic and verbal feedback
IBM patent
In 2002, IBM acquired a patent on a method to provide VI shoppers
with location and item identification at sites that have barcode
labels. The patent describes a portable unit that assists VI
shoppers at stores by providing them, through speech synthesis,
with information on their locations from various barcode labels.

Goals & Objectives

Goals
bring the Blind Customers to regular super market
shopping environment
applicable any blind customer despite the age,
gender, profession and knowledge.
to integrate each sub systems that will results
high efficiency

Objectives
reach project mile stones with in the
periods specified in project plan.
Keep the minimum project cost level under
20 000
Deliver the project on 10th November 2014

Procedures
Project development Phases
Requirements gathering
Feasibility Study
Design
Implementation

Project Planning

Task

Start

Finish

July

August

Requirement

2014-07-07

2014-07-21

Design

2014-07-22

2014-08-01

Implementation

2014-08-02

2014-09-30

Testing and

2014-09-01

2014-10-30

September

October

Analysis

debugging

Organizing
Task

Star
t

Finis
h

Gamag
e

Require
ment
Analysis

2014
-0707

2014
-0721

Design

Collision
Detection
Sys

2014
-0722

2014
-0801

Android
App
Impleme
ntation

Testing
and
debuggi
ng
Docume
ntation

Collision
Detecting
sys
hardware

2014
-0802

2014
-0930

Prami
th

Anurad
ha

Lilan

PIC
program
ming

Android
app

Database
impleme
ntation

RFID
devices
integratin
g

2014
-0901

2014
-1030

Evaluation
Performance matrices
Cost
Efficiency
Time
Accuracy
Observing performance matrices continuously

Budget

Budget
Device

Price

RFID reader

3000.00

RFID tag

150.00

PIC microcontroller

2000.00

Portable battery

2000.00

Alarm System

700.00

Total

8850.00

Thank You!