REANA: An RFID-Enabled Environment-Aware Navigation System for the Visually Impaired

Nearly 5% of the US population is visually impaired, and nearly half of this population is within ‘working age’ (18-69). In humans, the visual sense is the most important of the five senses, and a lack of it poses serious limitations, both in daily life activities and also in job placement. The most basic task enabled by the visual system is the navigation of spatial environments. More advanced tasks are the perception, recognition, and localization of objects and people in the scene, which also includes visual search. Recent developments in several technologies with the wireless network in the centerpiece can aid the visually impaired in many of these tasks. For example, GPS, infrared laser scanner, and RFID tags can help in spatial navigation that we exploit in our REANA system. In addition to basic navigation, REANA aims to provide capabilities for more advanced visual tasks, such as object and scene perception, identification, localization, and search. REANA has the potential to make the life of the visually impaired considerably more similar to that of a seeing person, giving him/her substantially improved quality of life.