TY - JOUR
T1 - A Social-Aware Assistant to support individuals with visual impairments during social interaction
T2 - A systematic requirements analysis
AU - Meza-de-Luna, María Elena
AU - Terven, Juan R.
AU - Raducanu, Bogdan
AU - Salas, Joaquín
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2019/2
Y1 - 2019/2
N2 - Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.
AB - Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.
KW - Assistive technology
KW - Computer vision
KW - Social interaction
KW - Visually impaired
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052849179&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.08.007
DO - 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.08.007
M3 - Artículo
AN - SCOPUS:85052849179
SN - 1071-5819
VL - 122
SP - 50
EP - 60
JO - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
JF - International Journal of Human Computer Studies
ER -