Abstract Nowadays, many people use smartphones in their daily lives. Unfortunately, users such as blind people have limited use of smartphones due to their disabilities. Most of the times, they have to rely on others to meet their daily needs. To overcome one of these problems, a mobile application that can help these people to shop in the supermarket without much reliance on other people is proposed. Using this application, users can scan barcodes of the products on the supermarket shelves and identify whether they would like to purchase the product. This application is also able to calculate the total price of all items to be purchased which helps the user to ensure that their purchases do not exceed their budgets. In realizing this solution, mobile programming will be used as a development technique to develop this application.
|
Objectives
- To design a mobile application to help the blind and visually impaired people reduce their dependency on other people in order to shop for retail items.
- To develop the application using mobile programming so that the blind and visually impaired people can know the details of products at the supermarket by using the application and at the time allow them to do shopping without exceeding their budget.
- To test the functionality of the system.
Problem Statements
- Blind and visually impaired people are often unable to find the items they want in retails stores.
- Blind and visually impaired people have to listen to all possible choices before they can choose the product they want. Even worse, if they miss the item they want, they have to listen to the entire list again when go for online shopping.
- They always had a problem to know the total cost of their purchasing at that time.
“Independence in one's daily activities, without requiring/requesting assistance from a sighted person, is of the highest priority”- P. E. Lanigan, A. M. Paulos, A. W. Williams and P. Narasimhan, "Trinetra: Assistive Technologies for the Blind," in International IEEE-BAIS Symposium on Research on Assistive Technologies (RAT), Dayton, OH,
Results
Conclusion
In conclusion, this is a simple and easy to use systems by the users that has interactive and non-complex interface; complete with tutorial. Not only the system can be used for the blind and visually impaired but also other people who wish to control their budget when going shopping. The system is very significant for blind and visually impaired people to enable them to do shopping independently in retail stores. Apart from the intention to make the system accessible worldwide, other recommendation for future work includes providing the direction for the users to find the desired retail items.
|