An open architecture to develop a handheld device for helping visually impaired people

The wide availability of modern handheld devices equipped with powerful hardware, large memory and mass storage, a webcam and wireless connection suggests that they can also be used to develop aids for visually impaired people. Most of the handheld devices and software currently available for this purpose are quite expensive, cannot easily be expanded and are based on closed systems, while little or no effort seems to have been made to achieve integration between different applications. This paper introduces Blind Assistant, an integrated modular, expandable, open source software package intended for showing that producing effective and affordable aids for the visually impaired is possible, by easily porting software currently available only for cumbersome personal computers, with little effort and at low cost.