Publish-Subscribe Architecture for Delivering Assistance to Visually Impaired People

:Visually impaired people face many difficulties in everyday tasks. In this paper we present a distributed architecture for delivering Assistive Technologies that can help a user in such tasks. The architecture allows a user using a internet enabled device to send images, video and GPS location to remote “Helpers” that can send messages back with helpful instructions or tips. The Helpers can be programs running on a remote server or real people invited by the user. The architecture is based on a publish-subscribe paradigm using MQTT protocol. A system, based on the proposed architecture, was implemented with a collision detector, a scene classifier and a object recognized. A qualitative analysis of experiments have shown positive results and pointed out some improvements.