Carnegie Mellon team develops disability-friendly devices

By Saravana Sivasankaran

Initiative to develop cost-effective assistive technologies for the blind 
using current technology

CAPTION: Shopping Cart device for the blind. Left to right: Priya 
Narasimhan, Andrew Williams, Aaron Paulos. by Noah Lorang

Sometimes tech projects that make the largest impact don't revolve around 
high-end, new technology. The key is the approach taken to finding a 
solution for the problem at hand, and being able to combine current 
technology with cutting-edge tech.

Take Trinetra, for instance, a project that aims to develop cost-effective 
assistive technologies to provide blind people with a greater degree of 
independence in their daily activities. The Sanskrit word Trinetra refers to 
the powerful third eye of the Hindu god Shiva.

Trinetra was started by Priya Narasimhan, an assistant professor of 
electrical and computer engineering and computer science, who struck upon 
the idea for the project one day in December 2004 when she noticed how 
difficult it was for blind people to catch a bus on a snowy Pittsburgh 
evening. Graduate research students Patrick Lanigan, Aaron Paulos, and 
Andrew Williams all opted to work under Narasimhan for Trinetra because of 
the passion they shared for working on a project that had the potential to 
help the significant blind population of Pittsburgh.

Trinetra technology has just been installed in Carnegie Mellon's campus 
store, Entropy, to make it easier for blind people to go grocery shopping. 
This assistive technology works as follows: Imagine a blind man walks into 
Entropy and wants to pick up a bottle of mustard. As he walks past one aisle 
to another, he uses a UPC-reading Baracoda pencil integrated with his phone 
to scan the barcodes on the shelves under the products he browses. The 
Baracoda pencil contacts the UPC database through the Internet-enabled phone 
and identifies the product. The information returned to the phone is then 
read out by TALKS, software developed by Cingular that was installed in the 
phone.

Dan Rossi, mentor to the Trinetra team, has been blind since he was seven; 
he is also the Oracle system administrator at Carnegie Mellon. A highly 
accomplished person in the area of technology, he was the guiding force for 
Trinetra, with researchers frequently waiting for his opinion on certain 
aspects of the project before moving ahead.

"We have involved a blind person from day one in the design of the project 
so that blind people's needs and inputs have been factored into our design 
in an intrinsic and fundamental way," said Narasimhan.

"You cannot imagine the real impact of this," Rossi said. "When shopping 
with a store assistant, it is nearly impossible to browse products. I ask 
for what I need, and they take me to that product, and that's it. A device 
that can tell me what just about anything in the store actually is is 
incredible."

There were many challenges faced by the Trinetra project. "The major 
challenge for us is to keep the project's outcomes cost-effective. If we 
develop technologies that end up increasing a blind person's cost of living 
significantly, we have really not lived up to our mission," Narasimhan said. 
"The other challenge is to resist the temptation to add in bells and 
whistles which, while they might be attractive to look at, have limited 
practical use to blind people." Since devices for the visually disabled are 
a niche market, they translate into high costs for the end user. Trinetra's 
bag of gadgets includes mostly off-the-shelf items that people without 
disabilities use every day.

One of the unique features of Trinetra that sets it apart from other ongoing 
projects is that it leverages available infrastructure. The developers don't 
have to pay for the barcode (UPC) database; it is already available on the 
Internet. These design decisions help keep costs down for the project, so 
insufficient funds have not been a cause of worry so far for the Trinetra 
team. When the project began, Narasimhan took money off her payroll to keep 
the project going. Since then, the project has survived comfortably on the 
$7500 of funding it received from the Pennsylvania Cyber Security 
Commercialization Initiative (PACSCI).

But there's more to worry about than just keeping costs low in a project 
like this. Narasimhan pointed out the privacy and safety issues that might 
arise for people using these services. Such issues and other more intricate 
ones have to be understood and analyzed simultaneously with the development 
of assistive technologies.

Trinetra's next mission is to make Carnegie Mellon's shuttle service 
friendlier to the visually impaired by keeping them informed of arrival 
times. The phone is again the preferred medium of communication, this time 
using text messages. To start things off, Narasimhan had her research 
students go around and try to get a feel of the shuttle service. The project 
might also end up being useful for students using the service late at night.

So what keeps the Trinetra team going? "The team designed, developed, and 
tested a concept that not only works, but is completely useful," said Rossi. 
"This is not a sensor net vest of pager motors and scanning hats that are a 
neat idea, but not practical in the least. The Trinetra system is practical 
and useful and I commend the team on their work."

The future looks bright for the Trinetra team. Narasimhan said, "My aim is 
for Trinetra to become one of the research thrusts of my research group, so 
that we can explore the application of embedded, distributed technologies to 
improve the quality of life for disabled people."

http://thetartan.org/2006/4/10/scitech/researchprofiles