Vision impairment is a major challenge faced by humanity on a large scale throughout the world. Affected people find independently navigating and detecting obstacles extremely tedious. Thus, a potential solution for accurately detecting obstacles requires an integrated deployment of the Internet of Things and predictive analytics. This research introduces “Vision Navigator,”a novel framework for assisting visually impaired users in obstacle analysis and tracking so that they can move independently. An intelligent stick named “Smart-fold Cane”and sensor-equipped shoes called “Smart-alert Walker”are the main constituents of our proposed model. For object detection and classification, the stick uses a single-shot detection (SSD) mechanism, which is followed by frame generation using the recurrent neural network (RNN) model. Smart-alert Walker is a lightweight shoe that acts as an emergency unit that notifies the user regarding the presence of any obstacle within a short distance range. This intelligent obstacle detection model using the SSD-RNN approach was deployed in real time and its performance was validated in indoor and outdoor environments. The SSD-RNN model computed an optimum accuracy of 95.06% and 87.68% indoors and outdoors, respectively. The model was also evaluated in the context of users’ distance from obstacles. The proposed SSD-RNN model had an accuracy rate of 96.4% and 86.8% for close and distant obstacles, respectively, outperforming other models. Execution time for the SSD-RNN model was 4.82 s with the highest mean accuracy rate of 95.54% considering all common obstacles.