Related papers: VisBuddy -- A Smart Wearable Assistant for the Vis…
Blind and visually challenged face multiple issues with navigating the world independently. Some of these challenges include finding the shortest path to a destination and detecting obstacles from a distance. To tackle this issue, this…
Imagine observing someone scratching their arm; to understand why, additional context would be necessary. However, spotting a mosquito nearby would immediately offer a likely explanation for the person's discomfort, thereby alleviating the…
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) encounter substantial challenges when it comes to comprehensive scene recognition and precise object identification in unfamiliar environments. Additionally, due to the vision loss, pBLV have…
Today, many of the aid systems deployed for visually impaired people are mostly made for a single purpose. Be it navigation, object detection, or distance perceiving. Also, most of the deployed aid systems use indoor navigation which…
We introduce Vinci, a real-time embodied smart assistant built upon an egocentric vision-language model. Designed for deployment on portable devices such as smartphones and wearable cameras, Vinci operates in an "always on" mode,…
It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a…
Despite advances in assistive technologies, Blind and Low-Vision (BLV) individuals continue to face challenges in understanding their surroundings. Delivering concise, useful, and timely scene descriptions for ambient perception remains a…
Navigating unfamiliar environments remains one of the most persistent and critical challenges for people who are blind or have limited vision (BLV). Existing assistive tools often rely on online services or APIs, making them costly,…
This research aims to find where visually impaired users find appliances hard to use and suggest guideline to solve this issue. 181 visually impaired users have been surveyed, and 12 visually impaired users have been selected based on…
Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks…
Grasping constitutes a critical challenge for visually impaired people. To address this problem, we developed a tactile bracelet that assists in grasping by guiding the user's hand to a target object using vibration commands. Here we…
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) face challenges in navigating. Mobility aids are crucial for enhancing independence and safety. This paper presents an electronic travel aid that leverages a haptic-based, higher-order sensory…
To overcome the travelling difficulty for the visually impaired group, this paper presents a novel ETA (Electronic Travel Aids)-smart guiding device in the shape of a pair of eyeglasses for giving these people guidance efficiently and…
The ability to shop independently, especially in grocery stores, is important for maintaining a high quality of life. This can be particularly challenging for people with visual impairments (PVI). Stores carry thousands of products, with…
Recent advancements in large multimodal models have provided blind or visually impaired (BVI) individuals with new capabilities to interpret and engage with the real world through interactive systems that utilize live video feeds. However,…
The study of algorithms to automatically answer visual questions currently is motivated by visual question answering (VQA) datasets constructed in artificial VQA settings. We propose VizWiz, the first goal-oriented VQA dataset arising from…
This paper explores the effectiveness of Multimodal Large Language models (MLLMs) as assistive technologies for visually impaired individuals. We conduct a user survey to identify adoption patterns and key challenges users face with such…
Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) owing to recent developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), are becoming increasingly intuitive and functional. They are especially promising for older adults, also with…
Object detection is crucial for ensuring safe autonomous driving. However, data-driven approaches face challenges when encountering minority or novel objects in the 3D driving scene. In this paper, we propose VisLED, a language-driven…
Accessible pedestrian signal (APS) was proposed as a mean to achieve the same level of service that is set forth by the American with Disability Act (ADA) for the visually impaired. One of the major issues of existing APSs is the failure to…