Mapping Accessible Paths in the City Using Collective Intelligence

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have an increasingly stronger role in people\u27s lives, especially after the commoditization of smartphones. They affect many aspects of everyday life, including urban mobility. Some applications, including Waze, benefit from the collective intelligence (CI) of the crowds to gather the information they need to provide users with good advice on the routes to follow. But they are mainly focused on roads and streets, giving little information on the quality of sidewalks, which are essential to pedestrians, people on wheelchairs and blind people. With the intention to improve the mobility of citizens with special needs, we developed the prototype of an application that allows users themselves to update accessibility maps, tagging obstacles and also indicating the existence of resources that contribute to improve the mobility of people with special needs in urban spaces. Tests in a controlled environment helped to debug the application’s functionalities, before members of the intended target group of users were finally exposed to it. Results are promising, as users were able to include relevant data by themselves and seem motivated to keep doing so, due a sense of utility, social facilitation or simply due to altruism, as anticipated by the CI literature. One unexpected outcome was that impaired users are more excited about the potential the application has to give visibility to the challenges they face than with the actual improvement it can bring to their mobility

Mobile Augmented Reality for Learning

Specht, M. (2012, April). Augmented Reality for Learning. Technical report for workshop at eLearning congress 2012. 's Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands.Until recently, augmented reality (AR) applications were mostly available for powerful workstations and high power personal computers. The introduction of augmented reality applications to smartphones enabled new and mobile AR experiences for everyday users. Because of the increasing pervasion of smartphones, AR is set to become a ubiquitous commodity for leisure and mobile learning. With this ubiquitous availability, mobile AR allows to devise and design innovative learning scenarios in real world settings. This carries much promise for enhanced learning experiences in situated learning. In the present article, we will look at different dimensions of mobile AR and exemplify their potential for education. At the end, we want to report on a short experiment that we conducted, called Locatory. It exceeds the current state of art for common mobile AR applications by introducing interactive and collaborative elements as well as gaming mechanisms

Non-Visual Representation of Complex Documents for Use in Digital Talking Books

Essential written information such as text books, bills, and catalogues needs to be accessible by everyone. However, access is not always available to vision-impaired people. As they require electronic documents to be available in specific formats. In order to address the accessibility issues of electronic documents, this research aims to design an affordable, portable, standalone and simple to use complete reading system that will convert and describe complex components in electronic documents to print disabled users

Dimensions of Mobile Augmented Reality for Learning: A First Inventory

Specht, M., Ternier, S., & Greller, W. (2011). Dimensions of Mobile Augmented Reality for Learning: A First Inventory. Journal of the Research for Educational Technology (RCET), 7(1), 117-127. Spring 2011.This article discusses technological developments and applications of mobile augmented reality (AR) and their application in learning. Augmented reality interaction design patterns are introduced and educational patterns for supporting certain learning objectives with AR approaches are discussed. The article then identifies several dimensions of a user context identified with sensors contained in mobile devices and used for the contextualization of learning experiences. Finally, an AR game concept, “Locatory”, is presented that combines a game logic with collaborative game play and personalized mobile augmented reality visualization

SLAM for Visually Impaired People: A Survey

In recent decades, several assistive technologies for visually impaired and blind (VIB) people have been developed to improve their ability to navigate independently and safely. At the same time, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have become sufficiently robust and efficient to be adopted in the development of assistive technologies. In this paper, we first report the results of an anonymous survey conducted with VIB people to understand their experience and needs; we focus on digital assistive technologies that help them with indoor and outdoor navigation. Then, we present a literature review of assistive technologies based on SLAM. We discuss proposed approaches and indicate their pros and cons. We conclude by presenting future opportunities and challenges in this domain.Comment: 26 pages, 5 tables, 3 figure

A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in Cooking

Individuals with vision impairments employ a variety of strategies for object identification, such as pans or soy sauce, in the culinary process. In addition, they often rely on contextual details about objects, such as location, orientation, and current status, to autonomously execute cooking activities. To understand how people with vision impairments collect and use the contextual information of objects while cooking, we conducted a contextual inquiry study with 12 participants in their own kitchens. This research aims to analyze object interaction dynamics in culinary practices to enhance assistive vision technologies for visually impaired cooks. We outline eight different types of contextual information and the strategies that blind cooks currently use to access the information while preparing meals. Further, we discuss preferences for communicating contextual information about kitchen objects as well as considerations for the deployment of AI-powered assistive technologies.Comment: CHI 202

Deep Thermal Imaging: Proximate Material Type Recognition in the Wild through Deep Learning of Spatial Surface Temperature Patterns

We introduce Deep Thermal Imaging, a new approach for close-range automatic recognition of materials to enhance the understanding of people and ubiquitous technologies of their proximal environment. Our approach uses a low-cost mobile thermal camera integrated into a smartphone to capture thermal textures. A deep neural network classifies these textures into material types. This approach works effectively without the need for ambient light sources or direct contact with materials. Furthermore, the use of a deep learning network removes the need to handcraft the set of features for different materials. We evaluated the performance of the system by training it to recognise 32 material types in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our approach produced recognition accuracies above 98% in 14,860 images of 15 indoor materials and above 89% in 26,584 images of 17 outdoor materials. We conclude by discussing its potentials for real-time use in HCI applications and future directions.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with