D.I. Palogiannidis1

1 St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University "LETI" n.a. V.I. Uljanov (Lenin) (St. Petersburg, Russia)

1 dimitris.palogiannidis@gmail.com

Existing electronic navigation devices for the blind and visually impaired report the presence and location of surrounding objects, but they do not assess the threat posed by moving objects and do not predict whether a user will enter their danger zone. The task of ensuring safe autonomous movement in a dynamically changing environment remains unresolved in the field of medical instrumentation.

The purpose of the work – to develop a wearable spatial navigation system for the blind and visually impaired, ensuring user safety in an environment of dynamic objects by estimating the velocity vector of moving objects and predicting whether the user enters their danger zones.

The system, implemented in the helmet's form factor, combines a high-performance computing unit, a camera, a laser rangefinder, a gyroscope, and a voice input device with a computer vision module that detects and localizes objects in a spherical coordinate system centered at the user's location. Each object is assigned a danger zone, the radius of which increases with the speed of the object and the hazard coefficient reflecting its mass and inertia. The use of a nine-sector surveillance space partitioning scheme provides threat resolution at both the foot and head levels of the user, forming a three-dimensional navigation sector for safe movement.

The described system can serve as a basis for creating wearable technical rehabilitation tools for the blind and visually impaired, providing proactive warning of threats, reducing the cognitive load on the user and adaptive navigation control in a real urban environment.

Palogiannidis D.I. A wearable navigation system for ensuring safety of the blind and visually impaired in dynamic environment // Biomedical Radioelectronics. 2026. V. 29. № 6. P. 115−120. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18127/j15604136-202606-19

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