Towards Ubiquitous Awareness Tools for Blind People

Blind people are deprived from a wide set of information about the surrounding environment. This is a reality for places, objects and people. In particular, if social norms are disrespected, the blind person is likely to miss out the presence and absence of people in the same room or passing by. Current mobile devices provide a bundle of sensors that are able to provide more information about its user’s whereabouts and people nearby. We focus our research on improving the implicit awareness these users have access about their surrounding environment. We interviewed 19 blind people to understand the limitations and needs they have in indoor and outdoor environments both in orientation and social tasks. Based on our findings, we developed a prototype system able to recognize people nearby and notify the user about their presence. A preliminary probe with 3 blind people revealed that such awareness is a requirement and shed light about novel scenarios pertaining recognition, augmentation and sharing of information about people, places and objects.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Ivo Rafael

Luís Duarte

Luís Carriço

Tiago Guerreiro

Conference

Publication date: September 2013

Publication date (Print): September 2013

Pages: 1-5

Affiliations

[0001]LaSIGE & Department of Informatics, University of Lisbon

Edifício C6, Campo-Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2013.47

SO-VID: f5070ba7-93b7-47a9-9ae7-acc3147001ec

Copyright statement: © Ivo Rafael et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. 27th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013), Brunel University, London, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: 27th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013)

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 27

Conference location: Brunel University, London, UK

Conference date: 9 - 13 September 2013

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2013)

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2013.47

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Towards Ubiquitous Awareness Tools for Blind People

Abstract