Locating and grasping objects is a critical task in people’s daily lives. For people with visual impairments, this task can be a daily struggle. The support of augmented reality frameworks in smartphones can overcome the limitations of current object detection applications designed for people with visual impairments. We present AIGuide, a self-contained smartphone application that leverages augmented reality technology to help users locate and pick up objects around them. We conducted a user study to investigate the effectiveness of AIGuide in a visual prosthetic for providing guidance; compare it to other assistive technology form factors; investigate the use of multimodal feedback, and provide feedback about the overall experience. We gathered performance data and participants’ reactions and analyzed videos to understand users’ interactions with the nonvisual smartphone user interface. Our results show that AIGuide is a promising technology to help people with visual impairments locate and acquire objects in their daily routine. The benefits of AIGuide may be enhanced with appropriate interaction design.
The authors of this work present a method that mines big media data streams from large Social Media Networks in order to discover novel correlations between objects appearing in images and electricity utilization patterns. The hypothesis of this work is that there exist correlations between what users take pictures of, and electricity utilization patterns. This work employs a Convolutional Neural Network to detect objects in 578,232 images gathered from over 15,000,000 tweets sent in the San Diego area. These objects were considered in the context of concurrent power use, on a monthly and hourly basis. The results reveal both positive and negative correlations between power use and specific objects, such as lamps (.053 hourly), dogs (−.011 hourly), horses (.422 monthly) and motorcycles (−.415, monthly).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.