We can’t deny the importance of Fashion in our society. The way you dress may indicate things like your personality, your beliefs, or even your social class is the way you choose to show yourself to the world. So when it comes to blind people, they may encounter some problems in dressing themselves due to their disability, they are unable to be certain that their clothing is what they believe it is as well as other issues such as the organization of their articles of clothing.
Thus, the aim of this project is to build an accessibility-focused smart wardrobe capable of helping blind people to manage their clothes, with the intention to improve their quality of life as well as solve those common problems.
The idea of the project is to build a wardrobe that is able to recognize, store, manages and retrieve pieces of clothing at the command of the user through a mobile app that is designed to be accessible to blind people.
The project will consist of three main sub-systems, the wardrobe, a mobile app, and the embedded system.
The figure below is a block diagram of the system as a whole.
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The Wardrobe consists of the mechanical and electronic systems of the project. It has a DC motor as well as a mechanical rotating rack system in order to be able to present the right clothing to the user, as well as a strategically placed RFID sensor in order to detect when the user inserts or removes a piece of clothing and infrared sensors to detect if clothing has fallen off the rack.
In addition to this, the system will include a separate section where the user will place new articles of clothing into it for the recognition of their attributes (color and patterns). It will consist of a closed-off section with a defined green background and a camera with LEDs for illumination as well as a magnetic door sensor for the system to know when to start.
There are some limitations due to the time and money available to develop all the designed product. The team have a time course of 10 weeks to complete an overall prototype, which will deliver the main proposed functionalities. As a proof of concept, the team will build a smaller-sized wardrobe, which will only store baby-sized T-shits.
The image below is a drawing to show an idea of how the wardrobe would look like if build in real size.