GoingEasy with Crowdsourcing - Building Cyber-Physical Systems for People with Visual Impairment

Abstract:

Many practical barriers continue to exist for a blind individual who strives to live an independent and active life, despite decades of development of assistive technologies. This project addresses the following two most prominent challenges: (1) disparity in information-sharing among people with visual impairment and its limited understanding by the research community; and (2) lack of methods and tools for effectively addressing the disparity. The central idea is to engage visually-impaired people and their families and friends to directly contribute to a joint endeavor of enhancing information flow, increasing awareness, and improving efficiency of assistive practices, through employing social media and participatory Web. The research is focused on designing computational methodologies and developing tools that are necessary for building cyber-physical systems for a domain where the tight intertwining of physical and cyber systems plus active participation of the human users are the key to attaining the otherwise unlikely capabilities for improving the quality of living for people with special needs. The key approach is to develop a blind-specific cyber-physical system that supports social-media-based crowdsourcing. This enables visually-impaired people to form ad-hoc virtual groups, actively contribute their information and knowledge, and ask/answer unique questions of special needs in their efforts of striving to live an independent and active life. Aiming at bridging a significant knowledge gap in addressing the challenge of disparity in information- sharing for people with special needs in the age of social media, the project contributes to the development of a deeper understanding of the principles and methodologies in building new cyber- physical systems that promote and support active participation of users of the system, which is especially important for special-need groups such as the visually impaired, the elderly, etc. The significant impact of the work on the society lies in its potential in empowering special-need groups to pursue active and independent living in the information era. The work's immediate impact on education is two-fold: supporting the visually-impaired students in independent learning and study as well as training students to work on emerging domains of tightly-intertwined cyber and physical systems.