>
>A professor turns cell phones into aids for the disabled
>
>By CATHERINE RAMPELL
>
><http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm>http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm
><<http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm>http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i42/42a01302.htm
>
>Three years ago, in the depths of a Pittsburgh winter, Priya Narasimhan saw
>a blind man trying to catch a bus.
>
>Stepping in and out of pools of slush, the man called out to passing
>pedestrians to ask if a vehicle he heard arriving was his ride home. Buses
>passed by.
>
>"We can do better than that," Ms. Narasimhan said to herself.
>
>Ms. Narasimhan, an associate professor of electrical and computer
>engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, soon became the hub for student
>research projects that develop technologies to assist the disabled by doing
>such tasks as identifying buses or translating sign language into spoken
>words.
>Their
>creations
>turn the most ubiquitous device on a college campus - the cell phone - into
>an independence-enhancing machine.
>
>Some of these endeavors are now being spun off into a small company. Ms.
>Narasimhan's and her students' accomplishments have come after countless
>hours of work, some for credit but much uncredited, and almost always not
>financed
>
>save for a small grant cadged from the university.
>
>Shortly after the bus incident, Ms. Narasimhan began kicking around ideas
>about ways to make blind people's lives easier using technology.
>Her main
>priorities
>were convenience and affordability, so her first inclination was to upgrade
>something many blind people already use: canes. Perhaps, she thought, she
>could create a cane that would give audio clues to the surrounding
>environment.
>
>In the process, she began consulting with Dan Rossi, a systems administrator
>
>at Carnegie Mellon who has been blind since childhood. Mr. Rossi has strong
>views about what kinds of technologies can help blind people. He told Ms.
>Narasimhan flatly that upgrading the cane, as other inventors have tried to
>do, was a terrible idea.
>
>"A cane is a cheap tool," he said. "You know, it's 20 bucks. You can break
>them, you can throw them away, you can get them wet, and they don't have to
>be recharged. It's like a pencil. You really don't want to soup up a
>pencil."
>
>Four Technologies
>
>Casting canes aside, the budding engineers starting looking at cell phones,
>which can be bought already outfitted with text-to-speech software and which
>many disabled people also already use. So far Ms. Narasimhan has advised
>three student projects that adapt cell phones for use by the blind, and one
>for use by the deaf.
>
>The first adaptation helps solve the problem faced by the blind man waiting
>for the bus. Her students' software program allows users to retrieve
>scheduled bus routes on their smart phones from the transit system's Web
>site. The schedules are then read aloud by the phone.
>
>But buses tend to be off-schedule, so Ms. Narasimhan said she is also
>lobbying the local transit authority to give her access to buses'
>GPS
>locations. That
>way a blind person can know for certain if the vehicle he hears approaching
>is the one he needs to board.
>
>The second project assists blind people in shopping for groceries or other
>goods by connecting a tiny bar-code reader to a cell phone, which retrieves
>product names from a free Universal Product Code database that is already
>available on the Internet. This way, Mr. Rossi said, he doesn't need a
>sighted person to help him determine if the cookie box he is holding is
>oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip.
>
>Ms. Narasimhan is hoping to build a new version of the public UPC database
>that will include nutritional information, pricing, and other details that a
>visually impaired shopper might want to know.
>
>Devices already exist that allow people to create custom-made bar-codes,
>which could be added to the new database so that blind users could label and
>
>then
>identify objects at home or at work.
>
>The last vision-related project Ms. Narasimhan and her students have been
>working on may receive more attention thanks to a major lawsuit.
>
>In May a U.S. appeals court ruled that the U.S. Treasury must change U.S.
>paper currency to make bills accessible to the blind. Unlike paper currency
>from most other countries, U.S. bills of different denominations are the
>same size and have the same texture. Blind people thus must ask sighted
>people to
>
>identify
>the bills they are given, and then usually rely on folding or organizing
>tricks to remember which bills are which.
>
>Ms. Narasimhan's students have provided an alternative. They have populated
>a database with images of bills, crisp and crumpled, well lit and shadowed.
>With special software, a blind person can take a picture of a bill using a
>cell phone camera. The software will transmit the picture to the database
>and name the bill based on an image match.
>
>There are already text-reading currency identifiers that can also read words
>
>from a variety of other sources. A blind person using these products must
>zoom in directly on the word "FIVE" or number "5," though, rather than any
>other part of the bill. Image matching, with the Carnegie Mellon system,
>does not have this limitation, though it has the disadvantage of not being
>able to identify unknown text such as that on menus.
>
>Mr. Rossi and Ms. Narasimhan said that for years they have been trying to
>get the ear of the Treasury Department - the defendant in the currency
>accessibility suit - about this project.
>
>"My point to them was 'You guys can either spend a whole lot of money
>modifying your currency or you could just buy a bunch of cell phones and
>give them away,'" Mr. Rossi said.
>
>He said department officials have always wished him well but are reluctant
>to support any particular company.
>
>So far Ms. Narasimhan has been financing most of the research out of her own
>
>pocket, though she recently secured a grant from the university for $50,000.
>She is trying to figure out how to get the prototypes off the ground,
>bundling them into a spinoff company called BeaconSys. When talking to
>potential financers, she and Mr. Rossi emphasize ways that this software
>created to help blind people could be useful to sighted customers - for
>example, the bus-schedule software would be helpful to anyone using public
>transportation - thereby expanding the market and bringing down prices.
>
>Attracting Outside Interest
>
>"I don't know what our exact price point will be, but it will be in the tens
>
>of dollars," rather than the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that
>specialized devices for the blind like currency readers and bar-code
>scanners currently sell for, Mr. Rossi said.
>
>Major national blind organizations have also shown interest, though Mr.
>Rossi says he is wary of aligning the projects too closely with either
>group.
>
>"The two main organizations, the National Federation of the Blind and the
>American Council of the Blind, are kind of along the lines of Democrats and
>Republicans.
>They hate each other, and if one says one thing, the other is against it,"
>he said, noting that the NFB has sharply criticized the AFB's lawsuit
>against the Treasury. "We're not getting into bed with anybody just yet."
>
>While trying to secure backing for the technology projects for the blind,
>Ms. Narasimhan has also been advising a nascent project that uses
>text-to-speech software on cell phones to assist the deaf. This project
>involves a gesture-recognition glove that can translate hand movements, such
>as American Sign Language, into spoken words. When a deaf person wearing the
>glove makes a sign, sensors in the glove translate each hand position into
>words that are then read aloud by the cell phone's text-to-speech software.
>That way, the deaf person can communicate with a hearing person who doesn't
>know ASL.
>
>This project is still in the early stages and right now can translate only a
>
>few test gestures - a thumbs-up sign triggers the phrase "Go, Pens!," for
>example, in honor of the Pittsburgh Penguins.
>
>Despite the financial straits Ms. Narasimhan's students say they are in, and
>
>the fact that they are no longer receiving course credit for this work, they
>devote many late nights and weekends to the assistive-technology projects.
>"I spend a little more time on this stuff than I should be, at least if I
>want to graduate anytime soon," said Patrick E. Lanigan, a graduate student
>who has been working on the technologies for the blind. But, he and his
>colleagues say, in this kind of work, they are motivated by more than the
>desire to obtain a degree, and have learned to get a lot of work done even
>when resources are scarce.
>
>"This has mostly been a soup-kitchen kind of project," says Ms.
>Narasimhan.
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