[gps-talkusers] Interesting article!
- From: "Leslie Peterson" <les537@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'Public discussion list on issues of technology for deafblind people'" <DBTECHIES@xxxxxxxxxx>, <gps-talkusers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Oct 2008 14:47:12 -0500
This is a copy of an interesting article I received.
Sight for the Blind and Speech for the Deaf
A professor turns cell phones into aids for the disabled
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm
<http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm>
Three years ago, in the depths of a Pittsburgh winter, Priya Narasimhan saw
a blind man trying to catch a bus.
Stepping in and out of pools of slush, the man called out to passing
pedestrians to ask if a vehicle he heard arriving was his ride home. Buses
passed by.
"We can do better than that," Ms. Narasimhan said to herself.
Ms. Narasimhan, an associate professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, soon became the hub for student
research projects
that develop technologies to assist the disabled by doing such tasks as
identifying buses or translating sign language into spoken words. Their
creations
turn the most ubiquitous device on a college campus - the cell phone - into
an independence-enhancing machine.
Some of these endeavors are now being spun off into a small company. Ms.
Narasimhan's and her students' accomplishments have come after countless
hours
of work, some for credit but much uncredited, and almost always not financed
save for a small grant cadged from the university.
Shortly after the bus incident, Ms. Narasimhan began kicking around ideas
about ways to make blind people's lives easier using technology. Her main
priorities
were convenience and affordability, so her first inclination was to upgrade
something many blind people already use: canes. Perhaps, she thought, she
could
create a cane that would give audio clues to the surrounding environment.
In the process, she began consulting with Dan Rossi, a systems administrator
at Carnegie Mellon who has been blind since childhood. Mr. Rossi has strong
views about what kinds of technologies can help blind people. He told Ms.
Narasimhan flatly that upgrading the cane, as other inventors have tried to
do,
was a terrible idea.
"A cane is a cheap tool," he said. "You know, it's 20 bucks. You can break
them, you can throw them away, you can get them wet, and they don't have to
be
recharged. It's like a pencil. You really don't want to soup up a pencil."
Four Technologies
Casting canes aside, the budding engineers starting looking at cell phones,
which can be bought already outfitted with text-to-speech software and which
many disabled people also already use. So far Ms. Narasimhan has advised
three student projects that adapt cell phones for use by the blind, and one
for
use by the deaf.
The first adaptation helps solve the problem faced by the blind man waiting
for the bus. Her students' software program allows users to retrieve
scheduled
bus routes on their smart phones from the transit system's Web site. The
schedules are then read aloud by the phone.
But buses tend to be off-schedule, so Ms. Narasimhan said she is also
lobbying the local transit authority to give her access to buses' GPS
locations. That
way a blind person can know for certain if the vehicle he hears approaching
is the one he needs to board.
The second project assists blind people in shopping for groceries or other
goods by connecting a tiny bar-code reader to a cell phone, which retrieves
product
names from a free Universal Product Code database that is already available
on the Internet. This way, Mr. Rossi said, he doesn't need a sighted person
to help him determine if the cookie box he is holding is oatmeal raisin or
chocolate chip.
Ms. Narasimhan is hoping to build a new version of the public UPC database
that will include nutritional information, pricing, and other details that a
visually impaired shopper might want to know.
Devices already exist that allow people to create custom-made bar-codes,
which could be added to the new database so that blind users could label and
then
identify objects at home or at work.
The last vision-related project Ms. Narasimhan and her students have been
working on may receive more attention thanks to a major lawsuit.
In May a U.S. appeals court ruled that the U.S. Treasury must change U.S.
paper currency to make bills accessible to the blind. Unlike paper currency
from
most other countries, U.S. bills of different denominations are the same
size and have the same texture. Blind people thus must ask sighted people to
identify
the bills they are given, and then usually rely on folding or organizing
tricks to remember which bills are which.
Ms. Narasimhan's students have provided an alternative. They have populated
a database with images of bills, crisp and crumpled, well lit and shadowed.
With special software, a blind person can take a picture of a bill using a
cell phone camera. The software will transmit the picture to the database
and
name the bill based on an image match.
There are already text-reading currency identifiers that can also read words
from a variety of other sources. A blind person using these products must
zoom
in directly on the word "FIVE" or number "5," though, rather than any other
part of the bill. Image matching, with the Carnegie Mellon system, does not
have this limitation, though it has the disadvantage of not being able to
identify unknown text such as that on menus.
Mr. Rossi and Ms. Narasimhan said that for years they have been trying to
get the ear of the Treasury Department - the defendant in the currency
accessibility
suit - about this project.
"My point to them was 'You guys can either spend a whole lot of money
modifying your currency or you could just buy a bunch of cell phones and
give them
away,'" Mr. Rossi said.
He said department officials have always wished him well but are reluctant
to support any particular company.
So far Ms. Narasimhan has been financing most of the research out of her own
pocket, though she recently secured a grant from the university for $50,000.
She is trying to figure out how to get the prototypes off the ground,
bundling them into a spinoff company called BeaconSys. When talking to
potential
financers, she and Mr. Rossi emphasize ways that this software created to
help blind people could be useful to sighted customers - for example, the
bus-schedule
software would be helpful to anyone using public transportation - thereby
expanding the market and bringing down prices.
Attracting Outside Interest
"I don't know what our exact price point will be, but it will be in the tens
of dollars," rather than the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that
specialized
devices for the blind like currency readers and bar-code scanners currently
sell for, Mr. Rossi said.
Major national blind organizations have also shown interest, though Mr.
Rossi says he is wary of aligning the projects too closely with either
group.
"The two main organizations, the National Federation of the Blind and the
American Council of the Blind, are kind of along the lines of Democrats and
Republicans.
They hate each other, and if one says one thing, the other is against it,"
he said, noting that the NFB has sharply criticized the AFB's lawsuit
against
the Treasury. "We're not getting into bed with anybody just yet."
While trying to secure backing for the technology projects for the blind,
Ms. Narasimhan has also been advising a nascent project that uses
text-to-speech
software on cell phones to assist the deaf. This project involves a
gesture-recognition glove that can translate hand movements, such as
American Sign
Language, into spoken words. When a deaf person wearing the glove makes a
sign, sensors in the glove translate each hand position into words that are
then
read aloud by the cell phone's text-to-speech software. That way, the deaf
person can communicate with a hearing person who doesn't know ASL.
This project is still in the early stages and right now can translate only a
few test gestures - a thumbs-up sign triggers the phrase "Go, Pens!," for
example,
in honor of the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Despite the financial straits Ms. Narasimhan's students say they are in, and
the fact that they are no longer receiving course credit for this work, they
devote many late nights and weekends to the assistive-technology projects.
"I spend a little more time on this stuff than I should be, at least if I
want to graduate anytime soon," said Patrick E. Lanigan, a graduate student
who
has been working on the technologies for the blind. But, he and his
colleagues say, in this kind of work, they are motivated by more than the
desire to
obtain a degree, and have learned to get a lot of work done even when
resources are scarce.
"This has mostly been a soup-kitchen kind of project," says Ms. Narasimhan.
block quote end
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