SESAMONET: A Navigation Aid for Blind People

For blind and visually impaired people is quite impossible to be autonomous in the contemporary world, in which we are completely surrounded by information, but only visual information... When looking for a product in shops, or ordering at the restaurant, or when they want to listen to the music on a CD, blind persons encounter the visual barrier of the written language, that only the help of another person can solve. In this paper the authors describe a new system based on RFID technology and designed for trying to solve this situation of impossibility of information that afflicts blind people. The project, called GLIDEO (GLove for Identification and DEscription of Objects), was developed by Marta Mei, as final thesis at “Politecnico of Milan” University, and now is being developed by the RFID LAB of “La Sapienza” University of Rome, for its interesting solution in the field or visual disability aids. The GLIDEO tech-glove is a sort of technologic wearable accessory that can store essential information about objects, and then let the user listen to them, as audio messages, using RFID tags and a PDA (connected to a Bluetooth headset), on which the software and the information’s database are installed.