Proposal Detail

This testbed focuses on incorporating flexible sensing systems to develop assistive living environments that enhance the everyday situational awareness for individuals who are ASU Scope of Work Page 2 blind/visually impaired. Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan, ASU Chief Research Officer of Knowledge Enterprise Development, will lead this effort. The participants from ASU are T. Hedgepeth, V. Balasubramanian, P. Boradkar, J. Klein, and J. Chae. Most of the work for this testbed will be done at ASU. They will solve the problems of daily living for the blind through the design of smart spaces embedded with flexible arrays of nanoscale pressure sensors combined with other miniature sensors including RFID, cameras, accelerometers, and gyroscopes. These sensors will be fabricated as sensor mats that can be installed on actively used surfaces (floors, table tops and counter tops) in living and working spaces, providing signatures for both objects and people, which can be used to provide situational awareness to individuals with visual impairments. Our earlier research has also shown us that high-bandwidth information from smart spaces needs to be delivered to the users in modalities other than audio or speech, in order to not overload the sense through which the users “see” the world. To address this need, we have developed novel haptic interfaces such as the haptic belt and the haptic glove to convey complex information such as interpersonal distance and facial expressions to users who are blind. In this project, we will use nanoscale pressure actuators to design novel nextgeneration interfaces that can be used to deliver information discreetly to the users.