Evaluation

Critical evaluation of the project

User Interface:

The APP is designed for visually-impaired people, so the UI need to be simple and convenient for them to operate. Our APP only has one big button in the UI, and most of functions are controlled by the voice instructions from the users.

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Functionality:

We have designed a mobile APP to do a voice guidence system for visually-impaired users by using ML and image processing technologies alongside the Realsense camera and NUC computer from Intel. Moreover, this mobile APP is mainly controlled by voice commands and provides haptic and acoustic feedback. The functionalities are including:

1. Provide the voice warning for users to avoid abstacles - remote system or static system.
The remote system rely on the the wearable Intel Realsense camera that users can easily take with.
The static system rely on connecting to the local Intel Realsense cameras from a location (building/zone) and to receive information from around that place.

2. Change the setting for voice guidence system. (Like volume, speed of voice......)

3. Record the data of the recognised objects into the local SQLite database - including the date and the time, the location, the remote/static attribute and either true/false for an error parameter.

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Stability:

The part of the system on which we worked on (everything besides the C++ server which was already implemented by the team that worked on this project before us) is very stable. The NodeJS client receives messages from the server and adds them into the Firebase at certain IDs with consistency, working every time. The Application can have moments in which it may not recognise the exact words. The reason for that is mainly the person who talks as he/she may have different accents or environmental factors such as environmental noise (of cars or other people). We tried to use words that don’t need advanced English pronunciation (e.g. start, stop). Besides that, every other part of the project should be stable and work the same every time.

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Compatibility:

Our application is compatible with both Android and iOS devices (although we did more testing on Android devices). Theoretically, this system (C++ Server & NodeJS Client) should run on a NUC computer from Intel. However, as we did not have one we used our PC to develop and test everything. So, it is compatible with regular computers as well.

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Efficiency and Maintainability:

Since we used in our system the fastest technologies, it is efficient and it runs fast. We did a lot of research for it and we tried to create explicit ReadMe files so that anyone could understand, use and modify the code with no problems.

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Project management:

Unfortunately for our team, because of the Covid-19, we could not manage this prject very efficiently. There were moments in which it was very difficult to talk to our clients because the communication was done in a remote way. The client could not send all of us the needed hardware - Intel Realsense camera (only one) and NUC computer (no one got this), so we ended up not being able to work the way we would like. So we tried to surpass those challenge by creating a very strict schedule of meetings and brainstorming sessions (we decided to have 2 meetings a week which were very helpful for us to create relationships between us and to work better and in a more productive way) and did the allocated tasks.