Third Eye : An Intelligent Assisting Aid for Visual Impairment Elderly

• Background Visually impaired older persons need support in daily activities, e.g. moving around inside the house; making and eating food and taking medicine independently. A system that simulates the environment based on both dynamic and static objects, identify obstacles, navigates and translates sensory information in voice would be valuable to support their daily activities. Today several sensors and camera-based systems are popular as ambient-assisted living tools for older adults. However, intelligent assisting aid (IAA) to support older individuals with a recently acquired visual impairment is limited. The proposed system ‘Third Eye’ focuses on the advanced research and development of an IAA to support older individuals with a recently acquired visual impairment. The main goal in this system is to provide a usable, feasible and cost-effective solution for older persons to support their daily activities using intelligent sensor based system. Method The system consists of the following five phases to meet several central challenges in developing IAA in such domain. • User-perspective, focuses on user-driven technical development, investigating needs of potential users. The study will have a participatory design with focus group interviews of lead users. • Sensor-based system, focuses on the identification obstacles based on ultrasounds and/or radio frequencies embedded in white-cane or weaker. • Camera-based system, focuses on image based information translation into voice embedded in white-cane or weaker or glasses. • System of systems, focuses on integration of above systems where knowledge is engineered and suitable representations are learned and reasoning for decisions are made [9]. • Experimental, focuses on usability and feasibility of the IAA, with idiographic and group studies Results The initial results have shown the necessity of the proposed AAI systems for older individuals with a recently acquired visual impairment. However, more extension work e.g., process and analyze the information and synthesize it with existing literature for developing the system is ongoing.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Medicinteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Medical Engineering (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

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