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- Creators: Arizona State University
- Creators: Panchanathan, Sethuraman
Description
Some disabled users of assistive technologies (AT) have expressed concerns that their use of those AT devices brings particular attention to their disability and, in doing so, stigmatizes them in the eyes of their peers. This research studies how a wide range of design factors, influence how positively or negatively users of wearable technologies are perceived, by others. These factors are studied by asking survey respondents to estimate the degree to which they perceive disabilities in users of various products. The survey was given to 34 undergraduate Product Design students, and employed 40 pictures, each of which showed one person using a product. Some of these products were assistive technology devices, and some were not. Respondents used a five-bubble Likert scale to indicate the level of disability that they perceived in this person. Data analysis was done using SPSS software. The results showed that the gender of the respondent was not a significant factor in the respondent's estimation of the level of disability. However, the cultural background of the respondent was found to be significant in the respondent's estimates of disability for seven of the 40 pictures. The results also indicated that the size of AT, its familiarity to the mainstream population, its wearable location on the user's body, the perceived power of the user, the degree to which the AT device seemed to empower the user, the degree to which the AT device was seen as a vehicle for assertion of the user's individuality, and the successfulness of attempts to disguise the AT as some mainstream product reduced the perceived disability of the user. In contrast, symbols or stereotypes of disability, obstructing visibility of the face, an awkward complex design, a mismatch between the product's design and its context of use, and covering of the head were factors that focused attention on, and increased the perception of, the user's disability. These factors are summarized in a set of guidelines to help AT designers develop products that minimize the perceived disability and the resulting stigmatization of the user.
ContributorsValamanesh, Ronak (Author) / Velasquez, Joseph (Thesis advisor) / Black, John (Committee member) / Herring, Donald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Typically, the complete loss or severe impairment of a sense such as vision and/or hearing is compensated through sensory substitution, i.e., the use of an alternative sense for receiving the same information. For individuals who are blind or visually impaired, the alternative senses have predominantly been hearing and touch. For movies, visual content has been made accessible to visually impaired viewers through audio descriptions -- an additional narration that describes scenes, the characters involved and other pertinent details. However, as audio descriptions should not overlap with dialogue, sound effects and musical scores, there is limited time to convey information, often resulting in stunted and abridged descriptions that leave out many important visual cues and concepts. This work proposes a promising multimodal approach to sensory substitution for movies by providing complementary information through haptics, pertaining to the positions and movements of actors, in addition to a film's audio description and audio content. In a ten-minute presentation of five movie clips to ten individuals who were visually impaired or blind, the novel methodology was found to provide an almost two time increase in the perception of actors' movements in scenes. Moreover, participants appreciated and found useful the overall concept of providing a visual perspective to film through haptics.
ContributorsViswanathan, Lakshmie Narayan (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Hedgpeth, Terri (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This paper presents the design and evaluation of a haptic interface for augmenting human-human interpersonal interactions by delivering facial expressions of an interaction partner to an individual who is blind using a visual-to-tactile mapping of facial action units and emotions. Pancake shaftless vibration motors are mounted on the back of a chair to provide vibrotactile stimulation in the context of a dyadic (one-on-one) interaction across a table. This work explores the design of spatiotemporal vibration patterns that can be used to convey the basic building blocks of facial movements according to the Facial Action Unit Coding System. A behavioral study was conducted to explore the factors that influence the naturalness of conveying affect using vibrotactile cues.
ContributorsBala, Shantanu (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis director) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Social situational awareness, or the attentiveness to one's social surroundings, including the people, their interactions and their behaviors is a complex sensory-cognitive-motor task that requires one to be engaged thoroughly in understanding their social interactions. These interactions are formed out of the elements of human interpersonal communication including both verbal and non-verbal cues. While the verbal cues are instructive and delivered through speech, the non-verbal cues are mostly interpretive and requires the full attention of the participants to understand, comprehend and respond to them appropriately. Unfortunately certain situations are not conducive for a person to have complete access to their social surroundings, especially the non-verbal cues. For example, a person is who is blind or visually impaired may find that the non-verbal cues like smiling, head nod, eye contact, body gestures and facial expressions of their interaction partners are not accessible due to their sensory deprivation. The same could be said of people who are remotely engaged in a conversation and physically separated to have a visual access to one's body and facial mannerisms. This dissertation describes novel multimedia technologies to aid situations where it is necessary to mediate social situational information between interacting participants. As an example of the proposed system, an evidence-based model for understanding the accessibility problem faced by people who are blind or visually impaired is described in detail. From the derived model, a sleuth of sensing and delivery technologies that use state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms in combination with novel haptic interfaces are developed towards a) A Dyadic Interaction Assistant, capable of helping individuals who are blind to access important head and face based non-verbal communicative cues during one-on-one dyadic interactions, and b) A Group Interaction Assistant, capable of provide situational awareness about the interaction partners and their dynamics to a user who is blind, while also providing important social feedback about their own body mannerisms. The goal is to increase the effective social situational information that one has access to, with the conjuncture that a good awareness of one's social surroundings gives them the ability to understand and empathize with their interaction partners better. Extending the work from an important social interaction assistive technology, the need for enriched social situational awareness is everyday professional situations are also discussed, including, a) enriched remote interactions between physically separated interaction partners, and b) enriched communication between medical professionals during critical care procedures, towards enhanced patient safety. In the concluding remarks, this dissertation engages the readers into a science and technology policy discussion on the potential effect of a new technology like the social interaction assistant on the society. Discussing along the policy lines, social disability is highlighted as an important area that requires special attention from researchers and policy makers. Given that the proposed technology relies on wearable inconspicuous cameras, the discussion of privacy policies is extended to encompass newly evolving interpersonal interaction recorders, like the one presented in this dissertation.
ContributorsKrishna, Sreekar (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Black, John A. (Committee member) / Qian, Gang (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Shiota, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Access to real-time situational information including the relative position and motion of surrounding objects is critical for safe and independent travel. Object or obstacle (OO) detection at a distance is primarily a task of the visual system due to the high resolution information the eyes are able to receive from afar. As a sensory organ in particular, the eyes have an unparalleled ability to adjust to varying degrees of light, color, and distance. Therefore, in the case of a non-visual traveler, someone who is blind or low vision, access to visual information is unattainable if it is positioned beyond the reach of the preferred mobility device or outside the path of travel. Although, the area of assistive technology in terms of electronic travel aids (ETA’s) has received considerable attention over the last two decades; surprisingly, the field has seen little work in the area focused on augmenting rather than replacing current non-visual travel techniques, methods, and tools. Consequently, this work describes the design of an intuitive tactile language and series of wearable tactile interfaces (the Haptic Chair, HaptWrap, and HapBack) to deliver real-time spatiotemporal data. The overall intuitiveness of the haptic mappings conveyed through the tactile interfaces are evaluated using a combination of absolute identification accuracy of a series of patterns and subjective feedback through post-experiment surveys. Two types of spatiotemporal representations are considered: static patterns representing object location at a single time instance, and dynamic patterns, added in the HaptWrap, which represent object movement over a time interval. Results support the viability of multi-dimensional haptics applied to the body to yield an intuitive understanding of dynamic interactions occurring around the navigator during travel. Lastly, it is important to point out that the guiding principle of this work centered on providing the navigator with spatial knowledge otherwise unattainable through current mobility techniques, methods, and tools, thus, providing the \emph{navigator} with the information necessary to make informed navigation decisions independently, at a distance.
ContributorsDuarte, Bryan Joiner (Author) / McDaniel, Troy (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Societal infrastructure is built with vision at the forefront of daily life. For those with
severe visual impairments, this creates countless barriers to the participation and
enjoyment of life’s opportunities. Technological progress has been both a blessing and
a curse in this regard. Digital text together with screen readers and refreshable Braille
displays have made whole libraries readily accessible and rideshare tech has made
independent mobility more attainable. Simultaneously, screen-based interactions and
experiences have only grown in pervasiveness and importance, precluding many of
those with visual impairments.
Sensory Substituion, the process of substituting an unavailable modality with
another one, has shown promise as an alternative to accomodation, but in recent
years meaningful strides in Sensory Substitution for vision have declined in frequency.
Given recent advances in Computer Vision, this stagnation is especially disconcerting.
Designing Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) for vision for use in interactive settings
that leverage modern Computer Vision techniques presents a variety of challenges
including perceptual bandwidth, human-computer-interaction, and person-centered
machine learning considerations. To surmount these barriers an approach called Per-
sonal Foveated Haptic Gaze (PFHG), is introduced. PFHG consists of two primary
components: a human visual system inspired interaction paradigm that is intuitive
and flexible enough to generalize to a variety of applications called Foveated Haptic
Gaze (FHG), and a person-centered learning component to address the expressivity
limitations of most SSDs. This component is called One-Shot Object Detection by
Data Augmentation (1SODDA), a one-shot object detection approach that allows a
user to specify the objects they are interested in locating visually and with minimal
effort realizing an object detection model that does so effectively.
The Personal Foveated Haptic Gaze framework was realized in a virtual and real-
world application: playing a 3D, interactive, first person video game (DOOM) and
finding user-specified real-world objects. User study results found Foveated Haptic
Gaze to be an effective and intuitive interface for interacting with dynamic visual
world using solely haptics. Additionally, 1SODDA achieves competitive performance
among few-shot object detection methods and high-framerate many-shot object de-
tectors. The combination of which paves the way for modern Sensory Substitution
Devices for vision.
severe visual impairments, this creates countless barriers to the participation and
enjoyment of life’s opportunities. Technological progress has been both a blessing and
a curse in this regard. Digital text together with screen readers and refreshable Braille
displays have made whole libraries readily accessible and rideshare tech has made
independent mobility more attainable. Simultaneously, screen-based interactions and
experiences have only grown in pervasiveness and importance, precluding many of
those with visual impairments.
Sensory Substituion, the process of substituting an unavailable modality with
another one, has shown promise as an alternative to accomodation, but in recent
years meaningful strides in Sensory Substitution for vision have declined in frequency.
Given recent advances in Computer Vision, this stagnation is especially disconcerting.
Designing Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) for vision for use in interactive settings
that leverage modern Computer Vision techniques presents a variety of challenges
including perceptual bandwidth, human-computer-interaction, and person-centered
machine learning considerations. To surmount these barriers an approach called Per-
sonal Foveated Haptic Gaze (PFHG), is introduced. PFHG consists of two primary
components: a human visual system inspired interaction paradigm that is intuitive
and flexible enough to generalize to a variety of applications called Foveated Haptic
Gaze (FHG), and a person-centered learning component to address the expressivity
limitations of most SSDs. This component is called One-Shot Object Detection by
Data Augmentation (1SODDA), a one-shot object detection approach that allows a
user to specify the objects they are interested in locating visually and with minimal
effort realizing an object detection model that does so effectively.
The Personal Foveated Haptic Gaze framework was realized in a virtual and real-
world application: playing a 3D, interactive, first person video game (DOOM) and
finding user-specified real-world objects. User study results found Foveated Haptic
Gaze to be an effective and intuitive interface for interacting with dynamic visual
world using solely haptics. Additionally, 1SODDA achieves competitive performance
among few-shot object detection methods and high-framerate many-shot object de-
tectors. The combination of which paves the way for modern Sensory Substitution
Devices for vision.
ContributorsFakhri, Bijan (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy L (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Amor, Heni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
This multimodal study brought an open, constructively critical challenge to the standard means of process in, and knowledge production from, qualitative inquiry. Using as a context, dyslexia, and the assistive technology lifeworlds of postsecondary students, this study co-partnered with six college students with dyslexia. Co-partnership allowed for an emergence of new awareness that the experience of dyslexia and assistive technology is mediated through innumerable dynamics of interactions with and through the world. Methodologically, the study suggested that it is possible to: (a) situate, center, and validate disability throughout all phases of qualitative inquiry; (b) make the discrete parts of action research more inclusive of disability; (c) reduce physical and intellectual access barriers to qualitative inquiry; and (d) regard as reasonable and rigorous research that is produced by bodies and minds that may not process information in typical ways. Emancipatory action research was used to thread together an understanding of the complexities of self, being, and reality for a marginalized group and how systems, structures, interactions, spaces, and language are superimposed on experiences of disability. The emancipatory spirited study allowed space for co-constructed meaning making through dynamic multimodalities of method including audio-visual data co-constructed through narrative storytelling; an analysis through deep listening and video editing – illuminating ‘bright spots’ in the broader lifeworld perspective of dyslexia and assistive technology. The innovative co-constructed products of the dissertation were a 2-hour film, a researcher reflection video, professional development guides for assistive technology and qualitative inquiry, and a methods chapter as part of an edited book prospectus. By engaging with this study, the audience will experience consciousness raising with respect to disability experience and witness a reclaiming of the voice of that experience through inclusive research. This study offers a transformative perspective for future work by inviting critical consideration and co-construction of meaning of an expanded conceptualization of assistive technology as an embodied, negotiated experience; and increases awareness that diverse bodyminds offer powerful narratives of diversity in the human condition and why that matters. .
ContributorsBunch, Jacob Colby (Author) / Graves-Wolf, Leigh (Thesis advisor) / Bowers, Nicole (Thesis advisor) / Harrop, Lance (Committee member) / Nusbaum, Emily A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023