Improving the Screen Exploration of Smartphones Using Haptic Icons for Visually Impaired Users

Francisco Javier González-Cañete; José Luís López-Rodríguez; Pedro María Galdón; Antonio Diaz-Estrella

doi:10.3390/s21155024

Improving the Screen Exploration of Smartphones Using Haptic Icons for Visually Impaired Users

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s21155024 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 21 (15) ◽

pp. 5024

Author(s):

Francisco Javier González-Cañete ◽

José Luís López-Rodríguez ◽

Pedro María Galdón ◽

Antonio Diaz-Estrella

Keyword(s):

Visually Impaired ◽

Recognition Rate ◽

Icon Recognition

We report the results of a study on the learnability of the locations of haptic icons on smartphones. The aim was to study the influence of the use of complex and different vibration patterns associated with haptic icons compared to the use of simple and equal vibrations on commercial location-assistance applications. We studied the performance of users with different visual capacities (visually impaired vs. sighted) in terms of the time taken to learn the icons’ locations and the icon recognition rate. We also took into consideration the users’ satisfaction with the application developed to perform the study. The experiments concluded that the use of complex and different instead of simple and equal vibration patterns obtains better recognition rates. This improvement is even more noticeable for visually impaired users, who obtain results comparable to those achieved by sighted users.

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Solar-Powered Deep Learning-Based Recognition System of Daily Used Objects and Human Faces for Assistance of the Visually Impaired

Energies ◽

10.3390/en13226104 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 13 (22) ◽

pp. 6104

Author(s):

Bernardo Calabrese ◽

Ramiro Velázquez ◽

Carolina Del-Valle-Soto ◽

Roberto de Fazio ◽

Nicola Ivan Giannoccaro ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Deep Learning ◽

Real Time ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

High Speed ◽

Low Cost ◽

Recognition Rate ◽

Object Identification ◽

Time Interval ◽

Solar Powered ◽

Human Faces

This paper introduces a novel low-cost solar-powered wearable assistive technology (AT) device, whose aim is to provide continuous, real-time object recognition to ease the finding of the objects for visually impaired (VI) people in daily life. The system consists of three major components: a miniature low-cost camera, a system on module (SoM) computing unit, and an ultrasonic sensor. The first is worn on the user’s eyeglasses and acquires real-time video of the nearby space. The second is worn as a belt and runs deep learning-based methods and spatial algorithms which process the video coming from the camera performing objects’ detection and recognition. The third assists on positioning the objects found in the surrounding space. The developed device provides audible descriptive sentences as feedback to the user involving the objects recognized and their position referenced to the user gaze. After a proper power consumption analysis, a wearable solar harvesting system, integrated with the developed AT device, has been designed and tested to extend the energy autonomy in the different operating modes and scenarios. Experimental results obtained with the developed low-cost AT device have demonstrated an accurate and reliable real-time object identification with an 86% correct recognition rate and 215 ms average time interval (in case of high-speed SoM operating mode) for the image processing. The proposed system is capable of recognizing the 91 objects offered by the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset plus several custom objects and human faces. In addition, a simple and scalable methodology for using image datasets and training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is introduced to add objects to the system and increase its repertory. It is also demonstrated that comprehensive trainings involving 100 images per targeted object achieve 89% recognition rates, while fast trainings with only 12 images achieve acceptable recognition rates of 55%.

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UX Design for the Visually Impaired to Improve Health Information Accessibility

International Journal of Engineering & Technology ◽

10.14419/ijet.v7i4.4.19605 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (4.4) ◽

pp. 38

Author(s):

Woo Jin Kim ◽

Min Ji Kim ◽

Il Kon Kim

Keyword(s):

Health Information ◽

Visual Information ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

Low Vision ◽

Recognition Rate ◽

Design Guidelines ◽

Information Accessibility ◽

Ux Design ◽

Information Recognition ◽

Improve Health

This study was conducted on individuals with low vision, who constitute the highest population among visual impairment patients. We conducted an experiment to determine whether there was an improvement in accessibility to visual information for the visually impaired after applying the UX design guidelines. Additionally, we analyzed whether this UX design affects the information recognition rate for the non-disabled individuals.

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Development of Haptic Communication Device for Disabled Persons

Volume 14: Emerging Technologies; Materials: Genetics to Structures; Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis ◽

10.1115/imece2016-65404 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Zoltán Szabó ◽

Eniko T. Enikov

Keyword(s):

Character Recognition ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

Human Subject ◽

Recognition Performance ◽

Recognition Rate ◽

Tactile Perception ◽

Tactile Display ◽

Vibrotactile Stimulation ◽

Visually Impaired People ◽

Impaired People

With the emergence of augmented and virtual-reality based information delivery technologies the gap between availability of communication devices for visually impaired people and sighted people is emerging. The current study describes a communication tool which provides a reading platform for visually impaired people by means of a haptic display. In this paper the development and human subject study based evaluation of an electromagnetic microactuator-array based virtual tactile display is presented. The actuator array is comprised of a 4 by 5 array of micro voice-coil actuators (tactors) providing vibrotactile stimulation on the user’s fingertip. The size and performance of the actuators is evaluated against the thresholds of human tactile perception. It is demonstrated that a 2.65 mm (diameter) × 4 mm (height) generic tactor is suitable for practical applications in dynamic tactile displays. The maximum force of the actuator was 30 mN generated at current levels of 200 mA. At a stroke of 4.5 mm, the force is reduced to 10 mN. The peak force was generated at a displacement of 1.5 mm. A total of 10 alpha-numeric symbols were displayed to the users via dynamically changing the location of the vibrating point in a predefined sequence, thus creating a tactile perception of continuous curve. Users were asked to sketch out the perceived symbols. Each subject carried out three experiments. The first experiment exposed all subjects to ten different characters. Data obtained from human subject tests suggest that users perceive most shapes accurately, however the existence of jump discontinuities in the flow of presentation of the curves lowers recognition efficiency most likely due to loss of sensation of solid reference point. Characters containing two or more discontinuous lines such as ‘X’ were more difficult to recognize in comparison to those described with a single line such as ‘P’, or ‘Z’. Analysis of the average character recognition rate from 10 volunteers concluded that any presented character was identified correctly in 7 out 10 tests. The second test included characters that were reused from the first experiment. Users had improved their character recognition performance as a consequence of repeated exposure and learning. A final set of experiments concluded that recognition of groups of characters, forming words, is the least efficient and requires further perfecting. Recommendations for improvements of the recognition rate are also included.

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A Simplified Research for Mathematical Expression Recognition and Its Conversion to Speech

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering - 2 ◽

10.35940/ijrte.b1008.0882s819 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 8 (2S8) ◽

pp. 1033-1038

Keyword(s):

Character Recognition ◽

Optical Character Recognition ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

Recognition Rate ◽

Mathematical Expression ◽

Expression Recognition ◽

Advanced Mathematics ◽

Data Set ◽

Visually Impaired People ◽

Impaired People

The number of visually impaired people appearing for various examination is increasing every year while on the other hand, there are several blind aspirants who are willing to enrich their knowledge through higher studies. Mathematics is one of the key language (subject) for those who are willing to pursue higher studies in science stream. There is a lot of advanced Braille techniques and OCR to speech conversion software's made available to help visual impaired community to pursue their education but still the number of visually impaired students getting admitted to higher education is less. This is not because most of the data is on paper in the form of books and documents. So, there is a great need to convert information from the physical domain into the digital domain which would help the visually impaired people to read the advanced mathematics text independently. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems for mathematics have received considerable attention in recent years due to the tremendous need for the digitization of printed documents. Existing literature reveals that, most of the works concentrated on recognizing handwritten mathematical symbols and some works revolve around complex algorithms. This paper proposes a simple, yet efficient approach to develop an OCR system for mathematics and its conversion to speech. For Mathematical symbol recognition, Skin and Bone algorithm is proposed, which proved its efficiency on a variety of data set. The proposed methodology has been tested on 50 equations comprising various symbols such as integral, differential, square, square root and currently achieving recognition rate of 92%.

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Articulatory Intervention for the Visually Impaired

Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools ◽

10.1044/0161-1461.1003.139 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 139-144

Author(s):

Cheri L. Florance ◽

Judith O’Keefe

Keyword(s):

High School ◽

High School Students ◽

Behavior Change ◽

Visually Impaired ◽

School Students ◽

Handicapped Children ◽

Paired Stimuli ◽

Visually Handicapped ◽

Parent Program

A modification of the Paired-Stimuli Parent Program (Florance, 1977) was adapted for the treatment of articulatory errors of visually handicapped children. Blind high school students served as clinical aides. A discussion of treatment methodology, and the results of administrating the program to 32 children, including a two-year follow-up evaluation to measure permanence of behavior change, is presented.

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