SBIR Phase II: Development of a Multimodal Interface for improving independence of Blind and Visually-Impaired people

SBIR 第二阶段：开发多模式界面以提高盲人和视障人士的独立性

• 批准号: 2025772
• 负责人: Daniel Pratt
• 金额: $ 98.91万
• 依托单位: UNAR LABS, LLC
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Cooperative Agreement
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-15 至 2023-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2025772&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; II; Development; Multimodal

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a new technology for blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people to use touchscreen devices and explore quantitative data. Currently there are no commercial solutions for the 285 million BVI individuals and their support networks to access text and graphical materials. The proposed project will advance software that converts graphical and text information into a form for BVI users to explore and utilize. This will enable greater education and work opportunities as well as greater independence.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II effort continues development of a novel touchscreen-based information access software offering multisensory representations of both text and graphical information in digital media. Information can be efficiently conveyed with graphical tools such as bar graphs, but BVI users cannot exploit these methods to synthesize data. This project develops the artificial intelligence (AI) framework to support automatic conversion of visual graphics into multisensory graphics and demonstrates its utility.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将为盲人和视障(BVI)人群开发一种新技术，让他们使用触摸屏设备并探索量化数据。目前，2.85亿英属维尔京群岛个人及其支持网络没有商业解决方案来获取文本和图形材料。拟议的项目将推动将图形和文本信息转换成供英属维尔京群岛用户探索和使用的形式的软件。这将使更多的教育和工作机会以及更大的独立性。这项小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段的工作继续开发基于触摸屏的新型信息访问软件，提供数字媒体中文本和图形信息的多感官表示。信息可以通过条形图等图形工具有效地传达，但BVI用户不能利用这些方法来合成数据。该项目开发了人工智能(AI)框架，以支持将视觉图形自动转换为多感官图形，并展示了其实用性。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。