Fall Risk Estimation for Visually Impaired using iPhone with Li-DAR

We have developed a fall risk alert system using a smartphone with a LiDAR sensor, Apple's iPhone 12 Pro, as an electronic travel aid (ETA) for visually impaired to reduce fall risks from the edge of station platform and the stairs. The proposed system generates the height grid map generated from 3D point clouds and posture from the smartphone, and classify the walking area to four areas, walkable, positive obstacle, negative obstacle and occlusion areas. In this paper, we describe the algorithm and the experimental results of the environmental recognition system for the fall risk alert. In the experiments, the accuracy, stability, and time delay are evaluated in approaching a fall risk area, such as stairs. The results show the smartphone has the possibility to be the ETA to support the visually impaired and reduce the fall risks. (c) 2022 The Author. Published by Sugisaka Masanori at ALife Robotics Corporation Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).