A Multimodal AAC Device for Individuals with Deafblindness

The concept for the Tactile Board emerged from co-creation sessions with members of the Deafblind community and aimed to support individuals with deafblindness in social interactions without the direct need of an intervener.

The handheld device is connected to a wearable that translates text messages and voice commands directly into haptic messages onto the upper back of the user. The messages sent through the Tactile Board can be sent to multiple devices at the same time, therefore allowing individuals with deafblindness to communicate with each other or send messages to a larger group of persons too.

If you are interested to read more about the Tactile Board, please follow the link to the published paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3428361.3428465

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On Monday, a demonstration of the Keep Your Distance system was presented to attendees. The system was a collaboration between Offenburg University and the Swedish School of Textiles in Borås. The haptic wearable was designed to be used in a navigation game where a person with deafblindness plays as a secret agent and another player is a suspect that should be followed. To win the game, the secret agent should follow the haptic signals provided on the belt area and keep an optimal distance of 1.5 meters from the other player.

We are glad to share that the Keep Your Distance demonstration was the most liked presentation at ASSETS 2020 and won the “People’s Choice Award” of the year. A special recognition was given during the conference’s closing ceremony. Congratulations to all the authors! You can check the video presentation here:

On Wednesday, our on-going work on exploring materials for making touchscreens accessible to users with deafblindness was also presented at ASSETS. The work explored the concept of creating accessible interfaces for pattern locks through rapid prototyping with materials easily found at home. Attendees were impressed by our raw quinoa braille prototype!

Overall, ASSETS 2020 gave us the opportunity to showcase our current SUITCEYES project results and discuss future research directions with a community of top researchers in the field of accessible computing. Looking forward to ASSETS 2021!

If you are interested in reading our work, please find the references for the conference proceedings below:

1. James Gay, Moritz Umfahrer, Arthur Theil, Lea Buchweitz, Eva Lindell, Li Guo, Nils-Krister Persson, and Oliver Korn. 2020. Keep Your Distance: A Playful Haptic Navigation Wearable for Individuals with Deafblindness. In The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’20), October 26–28, 2020, Virtual Event, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3418048

• Lea Buchweitz, Arthur Theil, James Gay, and Oliver Korn. 2020. Exploring Low-Cost Materials to Make Pattern-Based Lock-Screens Accessible for Users with Visual Impairments or Deafblindness. In The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’20), October 26–28, 2020, Virtual Event, Greece. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3418020 

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The conference took place in the beautiful Corfu, Greece, on June 26-29, and comprised of multiple sessions, three industrial workshops and seven regular workshops. Two project members, Oliver Korn and I attended the conference and I presented the first SUITCEYES publication, which was a peer-reviewed, full paper, titled, Empowering Persons with Deafblindness: Designing an Intelligent Assistive Wearable in the SUITCEYES Project, on Friday June 29, at the NOTION workshop.

This open access paper is available at ACM’s Proceedings of the 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference, with DOI: 10.1145/3197768.3201541

As the paper was already available, I used the opportunity to provide a context for the paper, by presenting some general information about the project SUITCEYES. I also included an update on some of the developments/experimentation that have taken place since the writing of the paper earlier this year.

Some of the slides (14 out of 30) related to these points are included below.

The presentation was followed by a short discussion comprising of a couple of questions and a comment that the data that we collect in this project can be very valuable to many others and a request to make as much of it as possible accessible for re-use by other researchers.

Otherwise, the conference was quite relevant for us where multiple assistive technologies and accessibility tools and methods were presented. Topics included for example, multimodal interfaces; gaze as input modality; identity management; audio, visual and tactile cues for remote assistance; haptic exploration of virtual objects; an assistive haptic system towards visually impaired computer science learning; emotion recognition; assistive spatial guidance and vibrotactile navigation; and more. In most of the solutions presented, there was a need for the presence of either hearing or visual senses. It seemed to me that the challenges that are to be addressed by SUITCEYES were unique and breaking new grounds.

The atmosphere of the conference was very warm and welcoming and many interesting connections were made. Food was delicious and the gala entertainment was enjoyable. One might have asked for a better weather, but then it would have become too tempting to skip some of the sessions and miss out. All in all, therefore, a very informative and useful conference. Thanks to the organisers and the participants.

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