Project Overview

The main goal of this project is to help blind people with the problems they could possibly encounter during their daily activities such as transportation, cleaning, cooking, etc. Besides we want every blind people ,who has nothing different but some disadvantages than normal people, to get as social as they can be.

The method we’ve used in this project is based on the communication between the blind people and the people who we refer as “companions” through our mobile application. First of all, we’d like to point out that we’ve developed 3 different type of “security protocols” to ensure the security and privacy of the blind people. Our first protocol is getting the users’ registration from an associated foundation. In our case it’s “Association of Blinds of Turkey”. We’ve come to an agreement, and provided our “User Registration and Management Program (URMP)” to them. We want all the companions who wants to register for the project to be not involved in any kind of crime. At the moment, we are in touch with some of the foundations such as WBU(World Blind Union), AFB(American Foundation for the Blind) and NFB(National Federation of the Blind). As soon as we have an agreement, we would like to launch our project worldwide.

The journey begins as the blind person sends his/her help request containing the details of where and when to go, to the system using the “Voice Command Algorithm” that we’ve developed. As soon as the request reaches to our system we send a notification to the nearest companions saying that “There’s someone near who needs your help!”. The companion’s first step is to determine who he/she wants to help and send an apply to him/her. Then, the blind person listens to the general information of the companion that have applied for the help request and asked to decide whether he/she wants to be helped by that companion or not. If approved, the “Meeting Up” phase would be activated and the location of the blind person will be sent to the companion. When companion arrives to the meeting point, application activates the “Journey to Destination” phase. In this phase we realised that, we need to have another security protocol since the blind person will be under the companion’s responsibility. Then we have developed a protocol that asks questions to the blind person via the mobile app, in every 30 minutes, that only he/she could answer. If one of these questions are not answered correctly or weren’t answered at all, a notification will be sent to the nearest foundation that uses our URMP. The operator that notified will be asked to call the blind person in order to confirm blind person’s safety. If necessary, the operator could share the last location data that collected from the blind person with a police station to send assistance to him. If all of the questions were answered correctly, there’d be no problems and the blind person could reach the destination safe and well.