| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
KUDO Hiroaki Center for Information Media Studies, NAGOYA UNIVERSITY, Assoc. Prof., 情報メディア教育センター, 助教授 (70283421)
YAMAMURA Tsuyoshi Aichi Prefectural Univ., Assoc. Prof., 情報科学部, 助教授 (00242826)
MINAGAWA Hiroki Tsukuba College of Technology, Assoc. Prof., 電子情報, 助手 (00273285)
MATSUMOTO Tetsuya Grad. School of Eng., NAGOYA UNIVERSITY, Assoc. Prof., 工学研究科, 助手 (40252275)
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| Research Abstract |
We studied and developed a system for helping blind children, especially the congenital blind, acquire spatial awareness and mobility with supplement feedback via auditory and tactile senses. Furthermore we conducted experiments at the school for the blind and obtained satisfactory results demonstrating the effectiveness of our system.
The system consists of two subsystems.
The one supports the blind to learn spatial awareness such as size and shape of an object and positional relation among objects. This system consists of a personal computer, an image-capture board, and a camera with three charge couple devices. There are four tasks - object selection (circle, triangle and square), object location, a tic-tac-toe game, and Hukuwarai (arranging face parts). The last two tasks are included so that blind children may enjoy performing them. A blind user is asked to arrange blocks of different shapes according to vocal commands presented by the system. When the user completes the arrangement
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task, the camera captures a picture of the block layout. The system analyzes the shape and location of each block by image processing and outputs the result as speech-whether it is correct or not, and the correction, if necessary. The system realizes a rapid response of less than two seconds and has a simple interface requiring only mouse clicking. By repeating tasks using auditory corrections instead of the help of sighted persons, the user acquires spatial awareness. We conducted experiments with three blind students, including a congenitally blind child, and two sighted children who were blindfolded. All of the subjects were interested in the system and the tasks, especially those involving games. We obtained the results with the hope that the proposed system will help blind children gain spatial awareness.
The other subsystem helps visually impaired children who have difficulty in simpler locomotion, and need orientation and mobility (O&M) training. We developed a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) system that helps visually impaired children to improve abilities of orientation and mobility. A user realizes a task given by a tactile map and synthesized speech. The user walks around a room according to the task. The system gives the gap of walking path from its target path via auditory feedback to a walking user, and via both auditory and tactile feedback after the end of a task. The user's walking path is measured by the system using an omnidirectional camera. Then the user can understand how well the user walked and will learn how to walk just as the user intends. We had an experiment with three visually impaired children using this system. One subject improved the result in walking as a straight line and another subject learned kinesthetic perception of absolute distance. Less
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