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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 12, 2026 · UTC

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-quantiz

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Evidence & attribution

First collected: 2026-09-24T14:02:34.369Z. This is not the publication date.