Week11: Meeting with Dr. Min and project revisit

 For detecting the object, we tried to detect chairs in the pictures by running the model. Although there are only three chairs in the pictures, the model detects every frames and shows location points more than three. Therefore, we tried to exclude the overlapping frame. As a result, outcome of running with the modified model is only three location like below picture.

Also, we met Dr. Min this week and discussed the progress of the course project. Although we are encountering many challenges, we made tough progress so far and moved the project forward. The most take away from the meeting with Dr. Min is that we were reminded that the key concept of this project is to understand what assistive technology is, what this technology is for, how we should consider when we want to design an assistive technology. Hence, for the final report, we may want to deliver a simple and clear design which can help the physically disabled people.

In order to achieve this goal, we re-visit the purpose of our project and try to provide a more clear rationale for our project. First, we identified that there is relatively a large population of disabled people in the USA. Disabled can be defined in many categories and for our study, we want to focus on the physically disabled people. Our goal is to help the physically disabled people to identify wanted items in home environments (The scope of the environment may be changed in the final report). Due to the length of the class, we don’t have time to interview and collect “customers’ needs”, so we think it will make our study stronger if we can do some survey study about “needs” and include that in the final report and presentation. In addition, since we focus on the home environment, we also want to look at what assistive technologies are available now and try to fill a knowledge gap/a need gap. Luckily, we find all the needed information regarding the descriptions above. The following paragraph is a revised rationale for our project (A preliminary version).

Introduction and Rationales

The number of disabled populations has been steadily increasing for the last decade [1]. Based on the Census Bureau report of 2017, there are 40.6 million disabled people in the US., which consists 12.7 percent of the entire population [1]. Specifically, 2.4 percent of American people have a vision difficulty and 6.9 percent of American people has an ambulatory difficulty. Namely, close to 10 percent of American people nowadays may encounter inconvenience to locate wanted items with their own endeavors. For outdoor environments, a large array of assistive technologies as well as volunteer labors have rendered a certain level of comfort for the physically disabled people to resolve this issue [2]. However, when it comes to indoor environments, the complexity of landscapes and furniture appliance settings causes great challenges for the physically disabled people.

For people without disability, locating wanted items at indoor environments is a mundane errand, while for the physically disabled people normally, they generally need extra help to accomplish the task. Considering the fact that there may not be helpers available at the indoor environment, the quest for the assistive technology has promising potentials to assist the physically disabled people. Nowadays, increasing number of physical disable people are using assistive devices to help them become more independent and accomplish daily tasks that they may have had trouble with before [3]. At indoor environment, a digital assistive device such as Amazon’s Echo, Apple Siri, and Google Home can be served as virtual assistants for physical disable people because these devices are able to communicate with users like a real person [4]. The virtual assistants from these devices can follow users’ orders and complete routine tasks such as creating a calendar appointment, telling the weather, making an online order, playing a movie or song, and so forth [5].

However, none of the devices mentioned above is able to help the user locate an item at the indoor environment [6]. In addition, no other assistive technologies have been identified to fulfill the functionality. Therefore, we want to use this study to design a device of assistive technology and help the physical disable people to quickly identify and locate a wanted item indoor. The rest of this report is organized as follows: In section 2, A literature review will be introduced; In section 3, we will present the approach and method for this project; In section 4, we will conclude the project and offer some insights for the future work.


Reference:
[1] United States Census Bureau. 2017. 2017 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.
DOI:https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=ACS_15_1YR_S1810&prodType=table

[2] Buehler, E., Branham, S., Ali, A., Chang, J. J., Hofmann, M. K., Hurst, A., & Kane, S. K. 2015. Sharing is caring: Assistive technology designs on thingiverse. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 525-534). ACM.

[3] Cook, A. M., & Polgar, J. M. 2014. Assistive Technologies-E-Book: Principles and Practice. Elsevier Health Sciences.

[4] Hoy, M. B. 2018. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and More: An Introduction to Voice Assistants. Medical reference services quarterly, 37(1), 81-88.

[5] López, G., Quesada, L., & Guerrero, L. A. 2017. Alexa vs. Siri vs. Cortana vs. Google Assistant: a comparison of speech-based natural user interfaces. In International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (pp. 241-250). Springer, Cham.

[6] Bickmore, T. W., Trinh, H., Olafsson, S., O'Leary, T. K., Asadi, R., Rickles, N. M., & Cruz, R. 2018. Patient and consumer safety risks when using conversational assistants for medical information: An observational study of Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. Journal of medical Internet research, 20(9), e11510.