Assistive technologies as effective mediators in interpersonal social interactions for persons with visual disability

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the use of assistive technologies for enriching the social interactions of people who are blind and visually impaired with their sighted counterparts. Specifically, we describe and demonstrate two experiments with the Social Interaction Assistant for, a) providing rehabilitative feedback for reducing stereotypic body mannerisms which are known to impede social interactions, and b) provide an assistive technology for accessing facial expressions of interaction partners. We highlight the importance of these two problems in everyday social interactions of the visually disabled community. We propose novel use of wearable computing technologies (both sensing and actuating technologies) for augmenting sensory deficiencies of the user population, while ensuring that their cognitive faculties are not compromised in any manner. Computer vision, motion sensing and haptic technologies are combined in the proposed platform towards enhancing social interactions of the targeted user population. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.