We believe that in the era of technological advancement, everyone should be able to get benefits from it. And also better equipment with more functionality providing more comfort is what makes people happy. Technology, till now, has been pretty biased towards disabled people as they are derived from contemporary technology and are stuck with mainstream one.

Our target group will be the visually impaired and the blind. This target group includes over 285 million people worldwide. Of these visually impaired, 36 million people are fully blind, and over 12 million fully blind from India. Of these visually impaired, about 90% of the world's visually impaired live in low-income settings, and 72% of people living with blindness are aged 50 and above. We reach them through various channels.

Mobility-aiding devices were developed to aid the visually impaired in identifying obstacles that they come across while walking. There are mobility aids that can help people with impaired visual ability. Majorly, visually impaired people use conventional canes for their mobility. The cane or walking stick is the simplest form of mobility aid. Conventional canes are not sufficient to provide the correct surrounding information at an accurate time period, thereby leading to difficulty in the mobility of visually impaired people. The visually impaired user using a conventional cane may use the cane in one direction while the obstacle may be in the other direction, Also, a cane may not guide the user about distant obstacles and obstacles that may be above ground level, such as branches of the tree which might injure him while walking even if he gets an idea of obstacles at ground level through the conventional cane. So, even with due care while walking, there is always a risk of such a wrong judgment in walking and the user may get misguided regarding the obstacles. This may result in an accident and thus one cannot fully rely on a conventional cane as an aid.

We believe that the project follows the following thematic areas,

1. Health and Hygiene

2. Community Development

3. Sustainable Livelihood

‘Saarthi - Smart Cane’ is an innovative product that can be used to sense the surroundings by visually impaired people, which will help them to navigate into their dark world. Saarthi can be attached to the white cane and the user will be able to sense the obstacles through feedback in the form of a buzzing sound and vibrating sensations. A powerful battery and microcontroller have been used to make it more effective and long-lasting with the availability of three accurate ranges. The user can use the device with a cane to find directions & obstacles in unfamiliar territories, whilst the device can be used independently in familiar regions for obstacle detection.

• Saarthi senses obstacles around and informs the same to visually impaired people beforehand through vibrations.
• Through this project, we look forward to increasing the income of visually impaired people by 40% in the next five years.
• When using the Saarthi the number of collisions will reduce drastically.