People who are blind share their images and videos with companies that provide visual assistance technologies (VATs) to gain access to information about their surroundings. A challenge is that people who are blind cannot independently validate the content of the images and videos before they share them, and their visual data commonly contains private content. We examine privacy concerns for blind people who share personal visual data with VAT companies that provide descriptions authored by humans or artifcial intelligence (AI) . We frst interviewed 18 people who are blind about their perceptions of privacy when using both types of VATs. Then we asked the participants to rate 21 types of image content according to their level of privacy concern if the information was shared knowingly versus unknowingly with human- or AI-powered VATs. Finally, we analyzed what information VAT companies communicate to users about their collection and processing of users’ personal visual data through their privacy policies. Our fndings have implications for the development of VATs that safeguard blind users’ visual privacy, and our methods may be useful for other camera-based technology companies and their users.
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Robotic assistant for visually impaired using sensor fusion
Disabled people are in a dire need of electronic assistance. There are a couple of electronic assisting devices that bring their life to an easier turn. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a personal assistant robot for blind people. Visually impaired people need such personal assistant devices for they provide a real-time assistance regarding any necessary problem that blind people face. Some of those main problems are navigation in the indoors, identifying objects around unless getting a physical sense of those objects and sensing the surrounding with the distance of multiple objects. Our paper discusses the various application targeting features like using the LIDAR for local mapping, using a 3D camera for understanding the depth of the surrounding so that the person understands the distance and other information of the objects around. This design has been experimentally validated and required observations are posted in this paper.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637371
- PAR ID:
- 10092492
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The IEEE Smart City Innovations 2017 (IEEE SCI 2017)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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