HCC: Small: Assistive Social Situational Awareness Aids for Individuals with Disabilities

HCC：小型：针对残疾人的社会情境意识辅助工具

• 批准号: 1116360
• 负责人: Sethuraman Panchanathan
• 金额: $ 49.93万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-01 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1116360&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: HCC; Small; Assistive; Social; Situational

The PI's goal in this project is to enable a quantum leap towards next-generation social assistive aids that enrich the lived social experiences of individuals with visual impairments. Social interaction is a central component of the human experience. The ability to communicate effectively with fellow individuals is a fundamental necessity for professional success as well as personal fulfillment. But nonverbal cues (including prosody, environment attributes, the appearance of communicators and their physical movements) account for a substantial and important part of the information conveyed during social interactions. As a consequence, the more than 1.3 million individuals in the United States (and 37 million worldwide) who are legally blind have only a limited experience of social interaction. This "social disability" often isolates them from their social environments. Existing assistive technologies are focused on problems such as navigation, reading text, and access to everyday appliances as well as to computers and the Internet, whereas little or no work has been devoted to real-time accessibility to social and behavioral cues. Providing real-time access to nonverbal communication cues to visually impaired users poses fundamental challenges in several related fields including affective computing, human communication engineering, behavioral modeling, machine learning, human-machine interaction, multimodal interfaces, usability engineering, multimedia computing, and assistive technology design and developmentAs a first step towards practical and viable social assistive solutions, the PI will focus in this project on the design and development of a social situational awareness assistive prototype for dyadic (one-on-one) interactions, with an emphasis on head/face-based nonverbal cues. The research will be accomplished through the following specific objectives: (1) Design and development of a dyadic interpersonal mediation interface; (2) Extraction and understanding of nonverbal communication cues; (3) Visuo-haptic sensory substitution for delivering high-bandwidth socio-behavioral data; and (4) Evaluation of the social assistive prototype system in dyadic interaction scenarios representing real-world conditions. The project draws upon intellectual synergies among the team members, who are experts in human-centered multimedia computing, human-computer interfaces and machine intelligence (Panchanathan, Computer Science); assistive technology design and usability engineering (Hedgpeth, Disability Resources Center); and human communication modeling and socio-behavioral analysis (Ramirez, Human Communication). The work will build on the team's past successes in developing assistive technologies that have been designed, prototyped, deployed and tested for individuals who are visually impaired. Project outcomes will be evaluated through the Arizona State University Disability Resource Center and the Arizona Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired.Broader Impacts: This project will pioneer the development of next-generation social assistive aids for individuals with visual impairments and thus will have a significant impact on their lives. The research to these ends will result in the advancement of computational thinking within and at the confluence of the component disciplines, namely socio-behavioral computing (through the introduction of novel methodologies for computational analysis and evaluation of human communication dynamics in general and social behavior in dyadic interactions, specifically), human-computer interfaces (through the design of novel interfaces that deliver high-bandwidth social data), machine intelligence (through the study of algorithms that elicit various levels of interaction semantics) and assistive technology/usability (through the development and evaluation of social assistive prototypes). The concepts and technologies developed will also provide pathways to technologies for individuals with other disabilities, such as autism, dementia, and (in the most general sense) a very large portion of society. The methodologies developed will provide a wealth of data and information that will be made publicly accessible to promote and catalyze further research in the component disciplines.

PI在该项目中的目标是实现下一代社会辅助工具的飞跃，以丰富视力障碍者的生活社交体验。 社会互动是人类经验的核心组成部分。 与其他人有效沟通的能力是职业成功和个人成就的基本必要条件。 但非语言线索（包括韵律、环境属性、交际者的外表和他们的身体动作）在社会交往中所传达的信息中占了相当大的一部分。 因此，美国有130多万人（全世界有3700万人）在法律上是盲人，他们的社会交往经验有限。 这种“社会残疾”往往使他们与社会环境隔绝。 现有的辅助技术主要集中在导航、阅读文本、使用日常电器以及计算机和互联网等问题上，而很少或根本没有工作致力于实时访问社交和行为线索。 为视障用户提供实时访问非语言交流线索的能力在几个相关领域提出了根本性的挑战，包括情感计算、人类交流工程、行为建模、机器学习、人机交互、多模式界面、可用性工程、多媒体计算和辅助技术设计和开发。PI将在这个项目中专注于设计和开发一个社会情境意识辅助原型，用于二人（一对一）互动，重点是基于头部/面部的非语言提示。 研究将通过以下具体目标来完成：（1）设计和开发一个二元人际中介界面;（2）提取和理解非语言沟通线索;（3）视觉触觉感官替代提供高带宽的社会行为数据;（4）评估社会辅助原型系统在二元互动场景代表现实世界的条件。 该项目利用了团队成员之间的智力协同作用，他们是以人为本的多媒体计算，人机界面和机器智能（Panchanathan，计算机科学）的专家;辅助技术设计和可用性工程（Hedgpeth，残疾资源中心）;以及人类沟通建模和社会行为分析（Ramirez，人类沟通）。 这项工作将建立在该团队过去成功开发辅助技术的基础上，这些技术已经为视障人士设计，原型，部署和测试。 项目成果将通过亚利桑那州立大学残疾资源中心和亚利桑那盲人和视力障碍者中心进行评估。更广泛的影响：该项目将率先为视力障碍者开发下一代社会辅助器具，从而对他们的生活产生重大影响。 研究这些目标将导致计算思维的进步和融合的组成学科，即社会行为计算（通过引入新的方法来计算分析和评估一般的人类交流动态和二元互动中的社会行为），人机界面（通过设计新颖的界面，提供高带宽的社交数据），机器智能（通过研究引发各种层次交互语义的算法）和辅助技术/可用性（通过开发和评估社会辅助原型）。 开发的概念和技术还将为患有其他残疾的个人提供技术途径，如自闭症，痴呆症和（最普遍的意义上）社会的很大一部分。 所开发的方法将提供丰富的数据和信息，这些数据和信息将向公众开放，以促进和催化各组成学科的进一步研究。