NEW DELHI, April 21 (Xinhua) -- The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi has developed a high-tech stick to make walking and commuting easier for the country's 9 million visually impaired people, Indo-Asian News Service reported Friday.

    The walking stick, named "smart cane," will help the visually impaired people easily commute by city buses, walk inside a room without knocking into things and take a safe passage in case of anemergency, according to the IIT Computer Science Department.

    The smart cane was made up of two parts, vibration technology to detect obstacles and ultrasonic ranger to help commute on city buses.

    With detective and vibration warning devices, the new cane can navigate much above the knee level and gauge the obstacle from over a three-meter distance, compared with the sticks in the market that can only navigate up to knee level within a range of one meter.

    With a user-triggered wireless identification system, vibration warning signal manager and a battery-driven speaker, the stick cansend radio frequency to a passing public bus to detect the route number and speak it out.

    The user wearing a mono-earplug will hear the number of a bus and get proper directions to reach its entrance and exit.

    But a small electronic box will need to be placed at the entrance of a bus, which will respond to the radio frequency sent by the device attached to the cane.

    The technology has been developed by students of the computer science department of the IIT in consultation with the National Association for the Blind (NAB).

    The new cane is capable of detecting fire exits in small and medium size buildings with proper backup devices, said Rohan Paul,the project coordinator.

    "We are going to patent the product and test run it on the streets of Delhi. It may take one year to make it ready for the market," he said. Enditem