Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
36 EyeCU - Assistive Eyewear
 Abishek Venkit
Irfan Suzali
Nikhil Mehta
 Shuai Tang design_document1.pdf
design_document2.pdf
design_document3.pdf
design_document4.pdf
final_paper1.pdf
proposal2.pdf
proposal1.pdf
Project Members: Irfan Suzali (isuzali2), Abishek Venkit (avenkit2), Nikhil Mehta (nikhilm3)

Title: EyeCU

Problem: Living a normal life can be difficult for the visually impaired. Although people with visual impairments can be largely independent in most scenarios, there are still cases where assistance is required in day-to-day activities. An example of this is reading the ingredients on a package of food, or identifying a mysterious object. We would like to provide this market with another layer of connection to their surroundings.

Solution Overview: Our solution is assistive eyewear for people with vision impairments. The eyewear will include a camera to capture the user’s field of view, a bluetooth module, and a battery to power the device. This visual information will be sent over bluetooth to the user’s smartphone, which will then compute the necessary contextual information about the scene in front of them, and output audio through the smartphone. This audio can be played on the phone’s speaker or through a pair of headphones connected to the smartphone. Additionally, we could add a microphone to the eyewear as well, allowing the user to input voice commands to specify what type of information they want about their surroundings. This feature is not essential to the function of our product, but could be an extra feature, given the time and need.

Solution Components:
Hardware Subsystem:
- Integrated Eyewear including camera, bluetooth, and battery
- Dedicated circuit to store and transmit images via bluetooth
- Low power circuitry for 24+ hour use

Software Subsystem:
- Bluetooth system to receive images
- AI/Computer Vision system on smartphone to analyze images and generate context info (May be connected to a cloud classification database like Azure)
- Text to speech to output audio information to user

Secondary Subsystem (optional):
Hardware:
- Microphone built into eyewear, also connected over bluetooth
Software:
- Natural language processing to understand commands from the user
- Used to specify what type of feedback the user wants on their field of vision.

Criterion for Success:
- A successful solution will improve the quality of life for the visually impaired in numerous ways, and will depend on the speed, accuracy, and usefulness of the glasses.
- The glasses must take clear, detailed photos of the surroundings to transmit to the phone.
- The processing of the images and response must be quick (under 2 seconds).
- The device allows the user to choose between different usage modes : text-to-speech, object classification, and possibly other modes.
- The feedback given to the user must be helpful (give them information otherwise unknown to them). For text, the device must recite the text back to the user (within 95% accuracy). For object classification, the device must recite the object back to the user along with its confidence (eg: “There is a bear in front of you with 20% confidence”).

Idea Post Link: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/ece445/pace/view-topic.asp?id=35979

Assistive Chessboard

Robert Kaufman, Rushi Patel, William Sun

Assistive Chessboard

Featured Project

Problem: It can be difficult for a new player to learn chess, especially if they have no one to play with. They would have to resort to online guides which can be distracting when playing with a real board. If they have no one to play with, they would again have to resort to online games which just don't have the same feel as real boards.

Proposal: We plan to create an assistive chess board. The board will have the following features:

-The board will be able to suggest a move by lighting up the square of the move-to space and square under the piece to move.

-The board will light up valid moves when a piece is picked up and flash the placed square if it is invalid.

-We will include a chess clock for timed play with stop buttons for players to signal the end of their turn.

-The player(s) will be able to select different standard time set-ups and preferences for the help displayed by the board.

Implementation Details: The board lights will be an RGB LED under each square of the board. Each chess piece will have a magnetic base which can be detected by a magnetic field sensor under each square. Each piece will have a different strength magnet inside it to ID which piece is what (ie. 6 different magnet sizes for the 6 different types of pieces). Black and white pieces will be distinguished by the polarity of the magnets. The strength and polarity will be read by the same magnetic field sensor under each square. The lights will have different colors for the different piece that it is representing as well as for different signals (ie. An invalid move will flash red).

The chess clock will consist of a 7-segment display in the form of (h:mm:ss) and there will be 2 stop buttons, one for each side, to signal when a player’s turn is over. A third button will be featured near the clock to act as a reset button. The combination of the two stop switches and reset button will be used to select the time mode for the clock. Each side of the board will also have a two toggle-able buttons or switches to control whether move help or suggested moves should be enabled on that side of the board. The state of the decision will be shown by a lit or unlit LED light near the relevant switch.

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