Design thinking approach to simplify monetary transactions for the people with visual impairment

Abstract

Design thinking, having applications in many fields, is emerging to be a pragmatic technique for facilitating Human Centred Design (HCD), a modern-day necessity, through a well-defined systematic process. This paper presents a case study detailing the application of design thinking principles to approach and develop solutions for the visually challenged to recognize the denomination of Indian currencies. Throughout the paper, specific implementations of design thinking principles have been detailed with emphasis on the key takeaways from the various stages. A comprehensive review of our approach compared to existing and unconventional applications has been provided to underline the importance of incorporating design thinking into emergent consumer-oriented solutions. A lot of research has been done in developing denomination classification models, however, there seems to be a lack of solutions designed through the perspective of a blind person who plays the critical factor in determining effectiveness once deployed. The design procedure helped us realize the importance of developing a simple user-friendly interface with a single input button and audio relays to guide the blind user during operation. Establishing a good platform for interaction and feedback was found to be critical in helping us modify and prioritize aspects such as achieving a low false-positive percentage and the addition of a high threshold Softmax function which made the solution design effective.

Banknote Denomination Recognition on Mobile Devices

“…To improve upon the prototypes made in our previous design thinking work (1) which relied on the back-end to process the image and send the results, a decision was made to develop the application to process locally and not have any network reliance for its operation. Special attention was given when developing the user interface by requiring minimal input from the user.…”

“…There is also no dataset available for the new Indian currency notes, annotated for object detection training. Our article incorporates the findings from our previous design thinking work (1) to develop the best available mobile application for banknote denomination detection. The mobile application developed is capable of detecting multiple notes present in the same frame with an extremely low false-positive percentage, provides instant audio feedback, and has an extremely simple user interface.…”