What is it about?
LiSee is the first neckband headphone wearable system, a lossless wearable form to help blind and low-vision users reach surrounding objects. LiSee is disguised as a neckband headphone and it is an extension of the existing headphone with a binocular camera and increased battery capacity. Visually impaired people can tell LiSee what target they want to grasp by voice, and LiSee provides torso-based and hand-based voice feedback. We believe that the form of neckband headphone has four advantages compared with related works: 1) it is easy to be accepted by the visually impaired because it is an extension of the existing earphones, 2) its camera is naturally oriented towards the desktop, and the ground with objects, 3) it is suitable for long-term wear and use at any time and 4) it has enough storage space to remain inconspicuous appearance. The evaluation results show that LiSee works robustly, indicating that it can meet the daily needs of most participants to reach surrounding objects.
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Why is it important?
Blind and low-vision users often need to access their personal surrounding space in daily life, that is, to reach reachable objects around them. For instance, they may need to reach a water cup from the table, to grab a mobile phone, and to pick up fallen objects, all of which are important basic living abilities for blind and low-vision users. However, as blind and low-vision users lack visual cognition and position awareness, it is difficult for them to complete these tasks. Unfortunately, existing related work requires blind and low-vision users to wear hand-worn devices (such as gloves and wristbands) or handheld mobile phones when needed, which prevents blind and low-vision users from releasing their hands and thus restricts them from completing other tasks. We consider devices that are inconvenient to wear and take off are not suitable for frequent use in daily life. Therefore, we proposed LiSee as a potential solution.
Perspectives
As a promising system, the combination of acceptability, wearability, comfort, and esthetics has been raised to a new level. We believe that with continuous iteration, the system can enter the daily lives of blind and low-vision users. We also call on more researchers to focus on the rarely studied topic of assisting the visually impaired to reach target objects. Please refer to the discussion in our paper for inspiration.
Kaixin Chen
Shenzhen University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: LiSee, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, September 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3550282.
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