GROCERY SHOPPING ASSISTANT FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED
Providing a great shopping experience to shoppers is the most competitive strategy taken by every
grocery owners. They are striving to satisfy the growing demands of today's savvy shoppers.
Unfortunately, most of the grocery owner is not actively pursuing a solution to create an
independent shopping environment to their customers who are blind and visually impaired people.
The information printed at the grocery items make shopping independently impossible for the
blind and very difficult for visually impaired people. This sensory capability had limits their
shopping activities in identifying items at the grocery store. There are many kinds of grocery
items that can be identified by the means of touch or smell such as vegetables and fruits, but it is a
challenging effort to differentiate a packaged items. Therefore, the blind shoppers must rely on
assistance from sighted individual or grocery employee to help them in getting the exact items
which burdening and wasting their time. This situation will restrict the independence movement
of the blind shoppers. The Grocery Shopping Assistant was created to assist the blind in
identifying grocery items during shopping using Radio-frequency Identification (RFID) and text
to speech technology. The blind only need to touch the RFID tag attached at the grocery item to
the RFID scanner. The necessary product information regarding the item will be extracted from
the database based on the primary key. This text-based information will be converted into a voice-
based and push to the user's hand phone via Bluetooth technology. The implementation of this
system allows blind people to shop as efficiently and safely as anyone else without having to rely
on anyone. This study also investigates user satisfaction of the system. The result exhibits that the
users are very impressive with the shopping independence that this system can offer them.
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