Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Literature Review: Orientation and Mobility Assistive Technology for Students with Visual Impairment

The development of increasingly sophisticated technology is accompanied by the discovery of new assistive devices that should be accessible to all people, including the blind in order to maintain or improve functions so as to improve welfare. This study uses a literature review method with descriptive analysis by analyzing 20 articles. The purpose of this research is to examine more related to assistive technology for the blind in navigating indoors and outdoors including buildings and the accessibility of public services. The literature search was carried out through an electronic search for publications from ERIC, Researchgate, Spingerlink, Sage, Science Direct, Google Scholar and IEEE Xplore. The results of the study describe the use of various assistive technologies for the visually impaired related to navigation in spaces or buildings and even the wider environment as well as public services that are commonly accessed by the public. Furthermore, it is related to the existence of a brief description of the assistive technology developed and the benefits of the results of the development for users

Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

There are around 285 million visually impaired people worldwide, and around 370,000 people are registered as blind or partially sighted in the UK. Ongoing advances in information technology (IT) are increasing the scope for IT-based mobile assistive technologies to facilitate the independence, safety, and improved quality of life of the visually impaired. Research is being directed at making mobile phones and other handheld devices accessible via our haptic (touch) and audio sensory channels. We review research and innovation within the field of mobile assistive technology for the visually impaired and, in so doing, highlight the need for successful collaboration between clinical expertise, computer science, and domain users to realize fully the potential benefits of such technologies. We initially reflect on research that has been conducted to make mobile phones more accessible to people with vision loss. We then discuss innovative assistive applications designed for the visually impaired that are either delivered via mainstream devices and can be used while in motion (e.g., mobile phones) or are embedded within an environment that may be in motion (e.g., public transport) or within which the user may be in motion (e.g., smart homes)

Iterative Design and Prototyping of Computer Vision Mediated Remote Sighted Assistance

Remote sighted assistance (RSA) is an emerging navigational aid for people with visual impairments (PVI). Using scenario-based design to illustrate our ideas, we developed a prototype showcasing potential applications for computer vision to support RSA interactions. We reviewed the prototype demonstrating real-world navigation scenarios with an RSA expert, and then iteratively refined the prototype based on feedback. We reviewed the refined prototype with 12 RSA professionals to evaluate the desirability and feasibility of the prototyped computer vision concepts. The RSA expert and professionals were engaged by, and reacted insightfully and constructively to the proposed design ideas. We discuss what we learned about key resources, goals, and challenges of the RSA prosthetic practice through our iterative prototype review, as well as implications for the design of RSA systems and the integration of computer vision technologies into RSA

SmartGuia: Shopping Assistant for Blind People

Dissertação de Mestrado Integrado em Engenharia Biomédica apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra.Tendo em conta as limita c~oes das pessoas com de ci^encia, o presente trabalho pretende agir num cen ario espec co melhorando a qualidade da vidas destas pessoas. Integrados num grupo de investiga c~ao em Internet das Coisas, colabor amos com tr^es institui c~oes, levantando requisitos no que concerne a aplicabilidade da Internet das Coisas para ajudar pessoas com de ci^encia. Depois disso, escolhemos e foc amo-nos no plano de trabalho adotado, sendo um dos cen arios identi cados onde poder amos ajudar. Com este trabalho e proposto um sistema para apoiar pessoas cegas na ida as compras e navega c~ao dentro de edif cios. O sistema proposto ajuda o utilizador a circular pelo edif cio e encontrar servi cos e produtos desejados ou dispon veis. Tem como objetivo aumentar a autonomia das pessoas cegas nas atividades do dia-a-dia dentro de edif cios. A pessoa cega n~ao tem acesso a informa c~ao dispon vel por meios visuais. O sistema consiste numa aplica c~ao para smartphone que oferece navega c~ao assistida em edif cios p ublicos, respondendo a quest~oes, guiando a pessoa, e disponibilizando informa c~ao objetiva sobre os espa cos, servi cos e produtos dispon veis. O sistema proposto inclui tamb em um sistema de informa c~ao. Este sistema de informa c~ao identi ca o destino pretendido e oferece informa c~ao concisa ou detalhada sobre os produtos ou sevi cos dispon veis. O sistema determina constantemente a localiza c~ao do utilizador, calcula rotas, guia a pessoa dentro do edif cio, e identi ca pontos de interesse na vizinhan ca da pessoa. O sistema requer tecnologia de localiza c~ao por beacons, que poder~ao por sua ver ser baseados nas tecnologias Bluetooth ou Wi-Fi. Relativamente ao estado da arte, a nossa solu c~ao oferece vantagens importantes: minimiza a intera c~ao com o utilizador, que seria necess aria para escolher destinos, produtos ou servios desejados em outros sistemas; lida com o ambiente din^amico resultxi ante da caminhada do utilizador, como a varia c~ao do n umero e posi c~ao de beacons ao alcance do utilizador; utiliza dispositivos que a pessoa cega j a possui, e eventualmente beacons que possam j a existir ou tenham uma custo de implanta c~ao baixo. Al em destas vantagens, desenh amos o sistema de forma a ser o mais f acil e intuitivo de utilizar poss vel, aplicando mecanismos acess veis a pessoas cegas. Para al em disso, o sistema est a desenhado para lidar com o dinamismo do caminhar, sendo que o n umero e posi c~ao dos beacons varia

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

Haptic Feedback to Assist Blind People in Indoor Environment Using Vibration Patterns

Feedback is one of the significant factors for the mental mapping of an environment. It is the communication of spatial information to blind people to perceive the surroundings. The assistive smartphone technologies deliver feedback for different activities using several feedback mediums, including voice, sonification and vibration. Researchers 0have proposed various solutions for conveying feedback messages to blind people using these mediums. Voice and sonification feedback are effective solutions to convey information. However, these solutions are not applicable in a noisy environment and may occupy the most important auditory sense. The privacy of a blind user can also be compromised with speech feedback. The vibration feedback could effectively be used as an alternative approach to these mediums. This paper proposes a real-time feedback system specifically designed for blind people to convey information to them based on vibration patterns. The proposed solution has been evaluated through an empirical study by collecting data from 24 blind people through a mixed-mode survey using a questionnaire. Results show the average recognition accuracy for 10 different vibration patterns are 90%, 82%, 75%, 87%, 65%, and 70%

BLINDSHOPPING: NAVIGATION SYSTEM

The QR trail is an android application that designed to encourage visually challenged person to participate in more normal activities as normal person does. Moreover, this application can be used by normal person as well to navigate around places when the person lost in a way. The main purpose of the project is to provide a navigation system for the visually challenged person to move around autonomously in supermarkets or hypermarkets and do some shopping. The application will provide a guidance for visually impaired person through voice command from the smartphone as the user need to scan QR codes on the floor which contains the details of current location and instruction to move from one point of the shopping mall to another point. The development of this application will use Eclipse development tool. The programming language that will be used the development process in Java language and ZXing library. The rapid application development methodology is applied in development process of this application which consists 4 stages which are system design, prototype cycle, system testing and implication