An Affordable AI-Integrated Smart Cane for Multimodal Mobility Assistance of Visually Impaired Users

arXiv cs.AISeptember 22, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2609.22277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual impairment affects over 2.2 billion people worldwide, yet conventional white canes cannot detect elevated hazards or provide semantic environmental context. Existing AI-assisted navigation systems typically rely on expensive hardware or cloud connectivity, limiting accessibility in resource-constrained settings. This paper presents an affordable (\$88 USD), fully offline AI-integrated smart cane designed for multimodal mobility assistance on an ultra-low-power Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. The system fuses RGB vision sensing with Time-of-Flight (ToF) distance estimation, pairing an INT8-quantized SSD MobileNet V1 model with distance-aware vibrot

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