Navigation Aid System for Blind / Visually Impaired People @maumiae-blog - Tumblr Blog

First Interview

Mau brought the vest and helmet with Kinect to perform the interview. Miae finalized the vibration belt.

Miae designed the braille, and mau printed it for testing any experience about fingertip braille display except the readability of the braille. The majority of the sighted people were not aware of perceiving the exact message, so it was hard to measure the literacy of the braille.

Songhui, wei and pai-ying participated the interview today.

We did 5 experiments:

walk with the braille display and a cane

walk with the vibration belt

walk with a TTS (Text-to-speech) in a smartphone

Try a vest with VGA camera

Try a helmet with a Kinect

We asked the participants about each prototypes’ feasibility, usefulness and easiness. The participants also compared between prototypes.

Here is a form of the interview.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByDTBxg0LZwCNzZaamNITXdBazQ/view?usp=sharing

Finalizing Prototypes

We submitted the IRB and this would not let us survey and interview to the blind people. Meanwhile, we are going to have a pilot survey towards our classmates.

We are going to have the same survey as we submitted to IRB. That means the classmates are going to image that they are blind people and take the survey. This seems silly, but we think this is also meaning process. We can get a lot of technical feedbacks because our classmates are familiar with the technologies.

In addition, we are going to have interviews with them, we need to finalize our prototype and arrange the time with them. We cannot expect how many people are going to have both the survey and the interview.

We have finalized prototypes like a helmet with Kinect. However, we still need to finalize other prototypes such as vibration belt, braille display, and camera with a vest.

These are our plans:

belt: We attached the motors to belt using epoxy glue and Miae will sew the belts.

braille: There is a program that makes a braille to 3D object file so that we can print the braille in a 3D printer. However, we cannot make the 3D object with the sign. Mau will ask the guy in 3D printers lab to make a 3D model.

camera: Mau is going to buy the vest.

Submitted IRB!

Mau and Miae submitted IRB at 4:59 PM today! The IRB process has been taking a long time and required a lot of revisions.The IRB requested us for the pictures of the prototypes such as the helmet with the camera, the vibration belt or the fingertip display made with 3D printing.The IRB process might take 14 business day and we cannot do anything until our application to be approved. We are going to make prototypes during the two weeks.Dr.Min gave us a lot of help with a number of detailed comments. Thank you Dr.Min!

Now the 8 motors started working! However, there is a bouncing problem of the push buttons.

Lunaric suggested the best way to solve this problem is to make an app and facilitate the app to control the motors. It has several benefits: to omit the bouncing problem, to make the project 10 times fancier, reduce the load of the circuit design on the belt, and more viable because a lot of visually impaired people have iPhone and don't want to carry additional device such as buttons with them.

We might ask for Bluetooth Dongle to Dr.min or buy at amazon(http://www.amazon.com/JBtek-Wireless-Bluetooth-Transceiver-Arduino/dp/B00L083QAC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1447214041&sr=8-2&keywords=bluetooth+arduino).

Besides Bluetooth, we are going to pack the belt for safety.

Here are our future works.

Make an app (approx. 10 hours)

Bluetooth implementation on the arduino (approx. 5 hours)

Make a belt that can do performance of 8 motors (??)

Make a protector for the arduino that is going to hang onto the belt (approx. 5 hours except printing) or exploit a box for arduino as a protector (approx. 2 hours)

Work flow

(1) -> (2)

(3)

(4)

(1),(3),(4) can be done parallel.

Lunaric, Mau and Miae met together at 9pm, Nov 9.

Lunaric got 10 mosphet and 10 diodes then made a circuit for manipulating 8 motors and validates the pushbutton codes.

the circuit for 8 motor is complex, so it took a time to validate it.

Mau wrote the code to control 8 motors; the program runs a motor for a second at a time and it makes a loop to run next motor and helped lunaric to design circuit.

Miae wrote the code to run 3 kinds of pushbutton; onoff button, mute button, delay button and integrated code.

onoff button is similar to ‘fuse’, it will turn on/off the whole circuit.

mute button stops vibrating, it will vibrating again when the environment changes. This prevents interrupting the user’s cognition while walking.

delay button postpones the circuit only when the user pushes the button.

Vibration Belt Prototype

There are some obstacles to implement the vibration belt.

We need to get additional machine to implement code to GAL-chip. Therefore, Miae requested to Prof. David meyer, Joe Bougher(lab engineer) in ECE 270 lab.

Without GAL-chip, we can only implement 6 vibration motors. However we also need a transistor ‘mosfet’ to amplify the signal to motor, because arduino uno have lack of capability electric current, 40mA.[1]

Lunaric(majored in EE) helped us soldering one vibration motor to arduino uno and checked if the motor takes the signal. It takes the signal well but didn’t work because of lack of the current.

We are going to bring arduino shield tomorrow to extend its capability to control DC motors. Reference [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOz41WQF7wE

Mau worked on getting non-exempt IRB. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get Dr.min’s sign because Dr.min was in Korea because of his visa. Now he will start correcting the survey and interview questions.

Miae and Mau are going to send a survey request email to blind communities in US, Koea, Guatemala.. etc.

For the prototype, Miae is going to make vibration belt and Mau is going to make finger-tip braille display.

Statistical Consulting Service with Nathan

Miae and Mau went to consult with Nathan(Ph.D student in stat department). We brought draft version of survey/interview paper and asked for some advice.

Nathan said that we need to ask about surveyee’s state so that surveyee can pass the questions that they cannot answer.

For example, a question like “Where do you go without caregiver?” is based on a assumption “blind people navigate with caregivers”. However, many blind people have no caregivers, it would be better to ask “do you have any caregiver for navigation?” before the question “Where do you go without caregiver?”.

Nathan said that we have too small number of sample size, it is hard to make statistically meaningful even for him. Therefore, we need to find other surveyee to enlarge our sample size.

[Progress report] Song and Kukho

Song wants to share the progress. They changed the concept of project. Please give them feedback.

The report is:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5AEkQm28_TEMFFpSnQ5WnlnTnM/view?usp=sharing

Visit to IRB Center on Mon 10/19

On monday 10/19 Mauricio visited the IRB center to talk to Amber. The objective of this meeting was to obtain key insights of her part for the application.

Mauricio took printed the Exempted application. She took some time to look at the application and because we are going to make the interview and make the interviewees to try the prototypes, she said we should make the non-exempted application.

She also recommended that in the part of the public place, she considers that the office of a person is not a public place, even though it is located in a public building.

She mentioned that we may submit our application as an expedited application, that can be approved between 10-14 days.

Meeting with Fizza Hider

Miae met Fizza. She is a blind students and working in ATC. Miae introduced about the navigation project briefly and asked her to participate interview. She loved to participate to our interview! YEAH Also, she commented that there are several ways to get information such as vibrating, braille display and sound. However there are some issues that vibrating can convey only few information, braille display is expensive and only few blind people uses it, sound can interfere blind people's listening.

statistic consulting services

http://www.stat.purdue.edu/scs/index.html

Purdue stat department provide consult services such as

proposal preparation design of studies survey design data input strategies data import/export analysis of data interpretation of results presentation of results other statistics or probability problems

We are going to use this precious resources to make our few survey results statistically meaningful.

#statistics consulting

Visiting #ATC @ #Purdue

On Thrusday 2015/10/08 from 10:30 to 11:30 Miae and Mau visited Assistive Tecnology Center (ATC) at Purdue located in Stewart Center Office 111.

We wanted to approach David Schwarte. We wanted to listen to the solutions that Purdue is providing to the blind/visually impaired student population. We also wanted to explain a little bit about our project’s goal for the class and also for forward research.

We also met Christina who is a staff member at ATC.

We started describing our project in at some detail that has been explained in previous posts, so we are not going to describe it again. David commented that he would be also good and easier to use something like a smart phone as the way to send the information to the user, because then he can decide which device he want to use, like earphones or even Bluetooth enabled braille display. He also mentioned that maybe we can get to the students at Purdue if we ask to the Disability Resource Center (DRC) to see if they can send out our survey to the students in campus to try to reach more users in our survey. He also mentioned that he has in his staff members other user that we could reach for our interview. He will

We also asked them about the solutions that ATC provides to Purdue Students with vision disabilities for indoor/outdoor navigation around campus.

David commented that at this very moment the solutions in navigation field provided to this population of students are almost none. However there had been different efforts that he is aware of since the very first moment he has been at Purdue. These solutions are mentioned as follows:

Tactile Maps was an initiative of Purdue in 1990′s to provide a way for the students with visual impairments to be able to explore around campus. However, due to the form of this solution it became very big as in that form the distance can be at 0.5 mm of distance. And the map of all campus finished being book of sheets of 60 cm x 60 cm and a 6 cm thick. That made the solution not only too big, but also very expensive. So, maybe it was only like 10 copies of it in all campus. In the next years there were also some initiatives to keep the map up to date but was very difficult to keep the pace of the different changes in buildings around campus. He mentioned that one person that is very experienced in this solutions is Heidy Smart that works at DRC.

There had been some efforts to work in a GPS solution a few times, but hadn’t been very successful, however the solution that he had been using some times is called BlindSquare. BlindSquare is a version of FourSquare for blind people and it is more useful giving information. This information is also uploaded by blind people society, that is how is more useful for them. However it doesn’t have the ability to give directions to go to that place. So, he has to copy and paste the address in google maps to do that. And then turns out some cumbersome.

Alternate to GPS there was an effort of a company to construct a web page that was going to give instructions to blind people not using GPS perse, but using other information useful for blind people. For instance, distinguishing that you are walking in cement or in bricks. That kind of information for vision impaired people is possible to determine while they are walking. Also for example if they are walking down a hill knowing and information like that.

The University also has a program of paying to an expert to come to teach to the students of visual impairments how to navigate around campus with their own white canes. However, it is a very expensive solution, given that this person has to be paid even for the transportation from and to his normal location which is usually Indianapolis.

At the end David was mentioning some of the problems that he and some other people with visual impairments have to overcome to navigate indoors and outdoors on campus. Some of the problems were:

Objects that are not attached to the floor. For instance, signs and triangular boards, emergency phones, etc.

Automatic doors can damage the canes, because it is not easy to know if it is opening or closing and the cane can be stocked between the door and the floor and that leaves the cane completely not useful.

He finished mentioning that we could contact to Brad Duerstock given that he has made some research related with this kind of issues.

[Progress report] Song and Kukho

Song wants to share the progress which has idea of the project she and Kukho working on. Please give them feedback.

The report is:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5AEkQm28_TENXZJQ1hnNzBxUFE/view?usp=sharing

Meeting with SongRyu and Kukho

Miae and Mauricio met SongRyu and Kukho to talk about their progress in the project. SongRyu and Kukho are a couple of IITP program exchange students visiting Purdue from Korea. Miae and Mauricio asked for forgiveness for coming late for the meeting, but they were before in a meeting that lasted for more than an hour in Dr. Min’s office.

Firstly SongRyu said that they understood what was written in the blog. That means, that she and Kukho already knew that the focus of our project for this semester will only focus in the needs assessment for the big project. And they showed their agreement in the sense that it is more important to obtain the real feelings of the end users to focus in giving a more effective solution. Even though it might be delaying our big project development for this reason.

We then discussed that they are really interested in building a solution in this field of study. So, we gave them three options of what they could do to continue working on it. The options offered were as follows:

They can continue working and making research in the braille device to locate in the fingertip of the end users.

They can work in an individual way that also comes up with a solution as minimal that it could be but still focused in the field of study of Navigation Aid for Blind/Visually Impaired people.

Work still in the group with Miae and Mauricio in the needs assessment / survey / interview.

After thinking for a while SongRyu mentioned that of the options presented to them, they would prefer to work in the second one where they might have a real solution developed at the time they will depart from Purdue.

Mauricio explained that that is also a good option and mentioned that when Miae came as NIPA student worked with other students in creating a white cane that using proximity sensors emits some sounds to let the end user that is close to an object. They might not come up with the same idea, but other cool idea like that one.

Finally we mentioned that we will still be gathering all wednesdays at 4:30 pm to talk about their progress. For this week we agreed that they will think in a possible solution smaller than the one that we are thinking on developing after our needs of assessment study. For next week they will try to come up with an idea of what they could create. And further work might involve a budget to show it to Dr. Min and see if we can get those funds to create the solution that they will look forward to build.

Meeting with Dr. Min

Miae and Mau met Dr. Min at his office right after class because they were worried about the comments that he made during their presentation. Where he mentioned that his concern was about how the people that is going to answer the survey will be able to give a real answer if they don’t get the chance to experience the technology that will be asked about.

Before we got to his office Miae suggested that we would be able to apply two different ways to obtain the information that we want to get. An online survey and a personal interview with a special group that could be ease to reach to

That is exactly what Dr. Min told us when we met him in his office. So, we will try to do it that way. For that purpose we will contact Dr. Supalo and Dr. Schleppenbach to see if they can help us to reach these groups of potential survey respondents.

Dr. Min told us that our focus of our project for the class is called Needs Assessment and that he was going to send some example of papers that were wrote and published by his colleagues from CMU.

We also talked to Dr. Min that we would like to continue with the project after the class, because we consider that this type of research is really going to be out of help for people in need. Maybe the way that we will continue working is treating it as an extra project we can work. Given that we will also focus in our research topics and/or course work.

IRB meeting

We went to the IRB center on tuesday 9/29 from 3:30 pm to 4:00 pm to explain what is our project about. And we started telling her the big project scope. However, we are thinking that in the time that we have during the class we only will be able to conduct a survey that will be very valuable for then focusing further studies and development of the system that we aim to have.

We made the following questions:

- Are we able to make a survey and submit the IRB application at the same time?

- Is there an specific form that will help us to get the certificate really fast?

We met Amber Martin and she gently gave us several good advice that we can do in order to accomplish our goal.

The key tips that we received are as follows:

- For the survey part (that concerns to this class) We have to submit the form 2 of Exempted Application.

- The time it takes normally is from 10 to 14 days to be approved and after getting it, we will be able to publish our results anywhere.

- She recommended us that the way to make the surveys the people that takes the survey shouldn’t be identified specially if they are kids.

- She mentioned that if we would like to develop and test the device, then we will have to submit a second application.

- Also she said that if we made some changes to the survey we can submit them as amendment, that is other form that is in the website.

- She mentioned that make a reference in the application that we talked to her, so she will be able to receive and take into account that she already talked to us about our project. And it might take less time.

After we had the IRB meeting we talked about the presentation and proposal as follows:

- motivation, process of our project, survey, example questions of survey, example of user interfaces of our project, estimated target or people who will take the survey, the thing we have to know to do the project, what paper we read until now(list title) ++++++...

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Navigation Aid System for Blind / Visually Impaired People