Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually-Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges,  and Future Directions

Elmannai, Wafa; Elleithy, Khaled

doi:10.3390/s17030565

Cited by 240 publications

(113 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…An Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) is a device that collects environmental information and transmits it to the user to allow independent movement [15]. Generally, ETAs detect obstacles in the user's path using one or more sensors and provide the information to the user through sounds, vibrations, or both [16,17]. The main advantage of an ETA over a regular white cane is its ability to identify obstacles above the waistline, therefore allowing more independent and safe mobility.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Are electronic white canes better than traditional canes? A comparative study with blind and blindfolded participants

Santos

Médola

Cinelli

et al. 2020

Univ Access Inf Soc

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Visually impaired individuals often rely on assistive technologies such as white canes for independent navigation. Many electronic enhancements to the traditional white cane have been proposed. However, only a few of these proof-of-concept technologies have been tested with authentic users, as most studies rely on blindfolded non-visually impaired participants or no testing with participants at all. Experiments involving blind users are usually not contrasted with the traditional white cane. This study set out to compare an ultrasound-based electronic cane with a traditional white cane. Moreover, we also compared the performance of a group of visually impaired participants (N = 10) with a group of blindfolded participants without visual impairments (N = 31). The results show that walking speed with the electronic cane is significantly slower compared to the traditional white cane. Moreover, the results show that the performance of the participants without visual impairments is significantly slower than for the visually impaired participants. No significant differences in obstacle detection rates were observed across participant groups and device types for obstacles on the ground, while 79% of the hanging obstacles were detected by the electronic cane. The results of this study thus suggest that electronic canes present only one advantage over the traditional cane, namely in its ability to detect hanging obstacles, at least without prolonged practice. Next, blindfolded participants are insufficient substitutes for blind participants who are expert cane users. The implication of this study is that research into digital white cane enhancements should include blind participants. These participants should be followed over time in longitudinal experiments to document if practice will lead to improvements that surpass the performance achieved with traditional canes.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Are electronic white canes better than traditional canes? A comparative study with blind and blindfolded participants

Santos

Médola

Cinelli

et al. 2020

Univ Access Inf Soc

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“…Up to now, there exists some vision-based assistive systems, which aim to improve perception experience of VI [10,12,5]. In particular, OrCAM [22] equipped with monocular camera is used to provide some special object information to VI, such as reading text and face recognition, etc.…”

Section: Visual Assistive Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deep Learning Based Wearable Assistive System for Visually Impaired People

Lin¹,

Wang²,

Yi³

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCVW)

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In this paper, we propose a deep learning based assistive system to improve the environment perception experience of visually impaired (VI). The system is composed of a wearable terminal equipped with an RGBD camera and an earphone, a powerful processor mainly for deep learning inferences and a smart phone for touch-based interaction. A data-driven learning approach is proposed to predict safe and reliable walkable instructions using RGBD data and the established semantic map. This map is also used to help VI understand their 3D surrounding objects and layout through well-designed touchscreen interactions. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that our learning based obstacle avoidance approach achieves excellent results in both indoor and outdoor datasets with lowlying obstacles. Meanwhile, user studies have also been carried out in various scenarios and showed the improvement of VI's environment perception experience with our system.

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“…Sensor-based assistive technology for visually impaired people has already a rather long history [41]. In IDEAL-CITIES, effort will be made in order to explore the possibilities made available due to recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for computer vision; such technology has already been made available for smartphones and other relatively low computing power devices [42] and has been constantly improving ever since [43].…”

Section: Assisting the Mobility Of The Visually Impairedmentioning

confidence: 99%

IDEAL-CITIES - A Trustworthy and Sustainable Framework for Circular Smart Cities

Angelopoulos

Katos

Κωστούλας

et al. 2019

2019 15th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS)

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Reflecting upon the sustainability challenges cities will be facing in the near future and the recent technological developments allowing cities to become "smart", we introduce IDEAL-CITIES; a framework aiming to provide an architecture for cyber-physical systems to deliver a datadriven Circular Economy model in a city context. In the IDEAL-CITIES ecosystem, the city's finite resources as well as citizens will form the pool of intelligent assets in order to contribute to high utilization through crowdsourcing and real-time decision making and planning. We describe two use cases as a vehicle to demonstrate how a smart city can serve the Circular Economy paradigm.

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Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually-Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions

Cited by 240 publications

References 41 publications

Are electronic white canes better than traditional canes? A comparative study with blind and blindfolded participants

Are electronic white canes better than traditional canes? A comparative study with blind and blindfolded participants

Deep Learning Based Wearable Assistive System for Visually Impaired People

IDEAL-CITIES - A Trustworthy and Sustainable Framework for Circular Smart Cities

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