Abstract
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) includes intelligent systems designed to monitor, assist, and promote a healthy environment. These technologies are an excellent opportunity for improving the lives of people, especially those who live with disability, illness, or aging. Much work has been developed for assistance through Ambient Assisted Living technologies, but the majority focus on the elderly, who have different needs from people who are visually impaired. The study presented in this paper explored the needs of people who are visually impaired and requirements for a virtual assistant in an AAL setting. In order to do so, we created an online questionnaire study and obtained 27 respondents who are visually impaired. Results indicated that 81,5% of respondents accept the idea of having a virtual assistant in their home. Also, we were able to gather a number of the difficulties faced by the users in their home, as well as the tasks that must be performed by virtual assistants to support such users.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Pinnelli, S., Fiorucci, A.: Giving voice to images: audio description and visual impairment: technological solutions and methodological choices. In: Ambient Assisted Living, pp. 347–355 (2015)
Cook, D.J., Augusto, J.C., Jakkula, V.R.: Ambient intelligence: technologies, applications, and opportunities. Pervasive Mob. Comput 5(4), 277–298 (2009)
Mukasa, K.S., Holzinger, A., Karshmer, A.I.: Workshop on intelligent user interfaces for ambient assisted living. In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 436–436 (2008)
Demográfico, C.: Características gerais da população, religião e pessoas com deficiência. Brasil Ministério do Planejamento, Rio de Janeiro, vol. 29 (2010)
Ganz, A., Schafer, J.M., Tao, Y., Wilson, C., Robertson, M.: Percept-ii: smartphone based indoor navigation system for the blind. In: Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, pp. 3662–3665 (2014)
Radványi, M., Solymár, Z., Stubendek, A., Karacs, K.: Mobile banknote recognition: topological models in scene understanding. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Applied Sciences in Biomedical and Communication Technologies, p. 185 (2011)
Oliveira, J.D., Borges, O.T., Paixão-Cortes, V.S.M., de Borba Campos, M., Damasceno, R.M.: Lêrótulos: a mobile application based on text recognition in images to assist visually impaired people. In: International Conference on Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 337–354 (2018)
Damaceno, R.J.P., Braga, J.C., Chalco, J.P.M.: Mobile device accessibility for the visually impaired: problems mapping and empirical study of touch screen gestures. In: Proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 2 (2016)
Ferreira, G., Penicheiro, R., Bernardo, P., Mendes, L., Barroso, J., Pereira, A.: Low cost smart homes for elders. In: Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds.) Universal Access in Human–Computer Interaction. Human and Technological Environments. UAHCI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10279. Springer, Cham (2017)
Połap, D., Woźniak, M.: Introduction to the model of the active assistance system for elder and disabled people. In: Dregvaite, G., Damasevicius, R. (eds.) Information and Software Technologies. ICIST 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 639. Springer, Cham (2016)
Choraś, M., D’Antonio, S., Iannello, G., Jedlitschka, A., Kozik, R., Miesenberger, K., Vollero, L., Wołoszczuk, A.: Innovative solutions for totally blind people inclusion. In: Garcia, N.M., Rodrigues, J.J.P. (eds.) Ambient Assisted Living. CRC Press (2015)
Chan, A.T., Gamino, A., Harris, F.C., Dascalu, S.: Integration of assistive technologies into 3D simulations: an exploratory study. In: Latifi S. (eds.) Information Technology: New Generations. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol. 448. Springer, Cham (2016)
Kerekešová, V., Babič, F., Gašpar, V.: Using the virtual assistant alexa as a communication channel for road traffic situation. In: International Conference on Multimedia and Network Information System, pp. 35–44 (2018)
van Heek, J., Himmel, S., Ziefle, M.: Helpful but spooky? acceptance of AAL-systems contrasting user groups with focus on disabilities and care needs. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Ageing Well and e-Health, pp. 78–90 (2017)
Maan, C., Gunawardana, U.: Barriers in acceptance of ambient assisted living technologies among older australians. In: Life Sciences Conference, pp. 222–225 (2017)
Dautenhahn, K., Woods, S., Kaouri, C., Walters, M.L., Koay, K.L., Werry, I.: What is a robot companion – friend, assistant or butler? In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 1192–1197 (2005)
Preece, J., Rogers, Y., Sharp, H.: Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. Wiley, Chichester (2015)
Barbosa, S., Silva, B.: Interação humano-computador. Elsevier, Brasil (2010)
Acknowledgements
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nivel Superior – Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Oliveira, J.D., Bordini, R.H. (2019). A Survey on the Needs of Visually Impaired Users and Requirements for a Virtual Assistant in Ambient Assisted Living. In: Latifi, S. (eds) 16th International Conference on Information Technology-New Generations (ITNG 2019). Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 800. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14070-0_62
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14070-0_62
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14069-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14070-0
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)