Disability is God given,
Handicap is man-made.
seen above the stairs at National Association for Blind, New Delhi
Visually impaired people regularly commute through buses, just like the rest of us. However, unlike the rest of us, they face huge trouble in locating the bus that they want to board, and also getting off at their required destination stop.
Assistech IIT Delhi has been working on a solution for boarding the bus, named OnBoard (http://assistech.iitd.ernet.in/onboard.php). However, there wasn’t a proper solution for getting off the bus till now. The buses have speakers to speak out the upcoming stops but they are mostly non-functional or play music instead of the announcements.
We are four students of IIT Delhi pursuing B.Tech in Electrical Engineering. As part of our Computer Science project course( Embedded Systems) COP315, we have developed a solution that allows easy de-boarding for the visually impaired. We call it “Deboard”. The ultimate aim is to integrate the OnBoard and Deboard solutions and create a single product that solves both the photos.
EDIT(Aug, 2019): We got an A grade in the project after the final evaluation 🙂
Our Team
Sarthak Garg
Varun Gupta
Ujjwal Agrawal
Raghav Gupta
Basic Overview Of Our Solution
We have built an application and server. The application is for the user-end solution. A visually impaired person can press a simple Query button on the app, and the app will speak out the next three bus stops in the route. The user can also set a reminder destination, and the app will give a reminder when that stop is about to arrive.
The live location of the bus can be seen using the server. The buses can also be assigned specific bus routes using the server, and so the bus operators can easily use the server for their needs. The ability to view live location will improve the feasibility of this idea as new Government rules require that public transport must require GPS installed on them.
We have built the user end in such a way that no GPS or internet connectivity is required by the application. This ensures easy scalability of this solution from the mobile application to cheap handheld modules and even wearables. The solution only requires Bluetooth functionality at the user end.
Deboard 