Development of swahili speaking body weight scale for visually impaired people in Tanzania

Abstract

Speaking weight scale is an important low vision health aid which measures and announces out the measured weight. It is valuable in numerous applications such as Bathroom scale, Kitchen scale and more. Different talking scales have been developed for blind community. Many talking scales have language option for English, German, French or Spanish. However, only limited work exists for Swahili speaking visually impaired community in East African Community (EAC) given the fact that no talking scale can announce weight in Swahili, which is the common language in EAC. Therefore, this project aims to develop a Swahili speaking weighing machine to assist visually impaired people in Tanzania. The proposed speaking scale is divided into two major parts. On the front-end of the design, sensors are used to capture weight parameters. The captured values are mapped onto sequence of voice patterns. The back-end consists of transferring a sequence of voice patterns to a loudspeaker whereby the voice patterns are stored on an SD card. Finally, the developed device has been evaluated on several objects (certified scale calibration weights) with known weights. Each object was reweighed two times. Placed certified calibration weights on the scale and note the output. Took the measured object off the scale and let the scale return to zero. Placed the same object on the scale again. Noted the output again. The results then showed that the scale displayed the same weights on each object. The expected weight of given objects was then compared with the recorded ones to assess the performance of the scale. The results then showed that the scale is able to measure objects, displays digital output of measured weight and announce it in Swahili language within the accuracy of 1% error range of the actual weight. The proposed device has a great potential as a low vision health aid for Swahili speaking. The features of this device can be further improved to increase the autonomy of blind people to use the device and navigate to the device’s location safely.