Comprehensive Literature Reviews on Ground Plane Checking for the Visually Impaired

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are an estimated 253 million people who live with vision impairment of which 36 million are legally blind. WHO also estimated that the number of people with vision impairment could triple within the next 30 years due to population growth and ageing. In order to improve the daily navigation and orientation, improved assistive technologies are required to ensure safer travel for visually impaired people. Over the years, there has been a considerable advancement in the creation of better assistive devices to support the daily activities of the visually impaired. However, from the findings, most of the existing assistive devices focus more on the obstacle detection in the surrounding rather than the ground plane hazards, which is also one of the dangerous hazards for the visually impaired. Thus, there were 30 papers being filtered out and reviewed to identify the existing research on the smart technologies in the past 10 years that support the visually impaired for their daily activities that involve both obstacle detection and ground plane hazards detection. This review aims to provide a better direction for future development based on an analysis of advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of the existing assistive technologies. Throughout the review, the general limitations of the existing research are the lack of user testing, user participation in the overall design, and the assumptions made about the environmental conditions.