Outline

• A Quick Word
• Overview
• Architecture
• People
• Support

A Quick Word

We first  consider a fundamental issue that the  society is facing today. The problem of vision loss is taking an enormous toll in the U.S. and around the world. 161 million people worldwide have vision impairment and without intervention the number will almost double by 2020. Of the 161 million people, 37 million are blind and 124 million have low vision. Vision loss affects people of all ages. Every five seconds someone in the world goes blind. A child goes blind every minute. It's very likely that you or someone you love may face vision loss due to age-related macular degeneration, cataracts, diabetes-related eye disease, glaucoma or other eye disorders. – These quotes by the Lighthouse International, a leading resource worldwide on vision impairment and vision rehabilitation throw light on the importance of developing systems that aid the blind and visually impaired. When they encounter new environments, it poses a huge challenge for them to perceive their surroundings without seeking help from others.

The blind and visually impaired encounter serious problems in leading an independent life due to their reduced perception of the environment. This project develops a system called PERCEPT that provides enhanced perception of their indoor and unfamiliar environments and thus aids the users in navigating through them. It employs RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to create an automated space - an environment with RFID tagged objects that interacts with the blind. We use an off-the-shelf RFID enabled mobile device (PDA) as the end device.

People

	Prof. Aura Ganz
Carole Wilson	Participated from Massachusetts Commission for the Blind.
	Sumana Mannem

Overview

The PERCEPT architecture is a RFID-enabled automated space for the blind and visually impaired, i.e. an environment with RFID tagged objects (audio landmarks, kiosks), that interacts with the users. Due to their ubiquitous usage and simplicity in operating them, we use off-the-shelf RFID equipped mobile devices (e.g. PDAs) as the end devices in PERCEPT. By blind and visually impaired, we refer to the population that can be termed as legally blind, i.e. a person with visual acuity 20/200 or less in the better eye with best correction. A majority of these people fall under the category of visually impaired; very few people are completely blind and most have some usable vision. Few characteristics of the system are as follows:

• Providing Enhanced Perception : The audio landmarks in our system hold information about the environment, which aids the users in navigating unknown and unfamiliar indoor environments in a relatively less difficult manner.

• Easy to learn and use: We assume that the ubiquitous usage of mobile platform devices will benefit our system in providing an easy-to-learn and use, portable end device (based on a PDA platform). No special skills are needed to operate the end-device.

• Extensible: The system can be easily adapted to serve people with other disabilities. A blind or visually impaired user will require a speech output while a user with other disabilities (like psychological disabilities due to closed head injuries) or even a user who is losing vision but can still make use of his sight could use a text output.

• Scalability: Our system uses cheap, passive RFID tags that can be deployed at a large number of places and thus serve a large user base.

Architecture

The PERCEPT system has been designed keeping in mind the end users of our system, namely the blind and the visually impaired. Our main goals are therefore to keep our system architecture simple, include easy-to-learn and use devices, and simultaneously provide an enhanced perception of the environment.

Some of the key components of our architecture are:
1. Audio landmarks (RFID tag)
2. Audio kiosks (a number of RFID tags)
3. Client component: PDA (end user device) clubbed with the RFID reader
4. Wireless network connecting the device to the server (Wireless LAN infrastructure)
5. Server components

Following figure gives an overview of the PERCEPT System architecture.

Support

The research work in the laboratory is supported by a grant from.

National Science Foundation