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Wireless Personal Area Network-Based Assistance For The Visually Impaired, Kurt Matthew Peters
Wireless Personal Area Network-Based Assistance For The Visually Impaired, Kurt Matthew Peters
Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations
In this dissertation, a system allowing a visually impaired person to interact with his environment is developed using modern, low-power wireless communications techniques. With recent advances in wireless sensor networks, open-source operating systems, and embedded processing technology, low-cost devices have become practically feasible as a personal notification system for impaired people. Additionally, text-to-speech capabilities can now be employed without special application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), allowing low-cost, general-purpose processors to fill a niche that once required expensive semiconductors.
The system takes advantage of 802.15.4 and media access control (MAC) protocols offered by the open source operating system TinyOS. Important characteristics …