The success of ambient interactive environments for people who are blind or visually impaired is measured according to the extent to which they promote independence by endowing these individuals with equal access to the same information that is available to people who are sighted. In this project the PI will explore an innovative "polymorphic" framework for such systems, which integrates the user's various sensory modalities in order to assume context-specific roles appropriate to a variety of people and situations. The approach will be given concrete embodiment within the context of an interactive shopping application. Called iCARE, this prototype system will advance the technology of ambient interactive environments through its unique alignment of the system framework to the paradigm of everyday understanding in human psychology, namely sensation, perception and cognition. At the sensation level, sensors of different modalities (including RFID tags and readers, proximity sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes) will gather data from the environment. These data will be assimilated by a centralized server and analyzed at the perception level to extract information, using techniques such as dead reckoning. Finally, at the cognitive level, the gathered information is presented in a manner that is relevant to a particular user.
Broader Impacts: While the immediate focus of the project is on providing a viable and holistic independent shopping experience for the specified target population, the techniques developed will generalize and serve as a template for future delocalized one-point solutions for other types of large public environments. Ultimately, the approach may lead to the acceptance and adoption of similar systems by the mainstream market (e.g., for e-commerce applications).
