In the June 2015 issue of AccessWorld, we described the AT&T NYU Connect Ability Challenge, where individuals and teams compete to develop technologies that offer new and creative solutions that can improve the lives of New Yorkers and others around the world. For the 2015 Challenge, a total of $100,000 in prize money was awarded. The winners were announced at an awards dinner on July 27. As promised back in June, this follow up article will tell you about the Challenge winners and describe their prize-winning entries. We'll save the best for last: a pair of winners—Enlight and Accessible Peak Meter—that focus on assisting the sight impaired.
Kinesic Mouse: $25,000 Grand Prize Winner and $10,000 Best Mobility Solution
The Kinesic Mouse is a software package that uses a 3D camera to detect facial expressions and head rotations so that users with movement impairments can operate a computer, game console joystick, or keyboard totally hands free.
Ava: $10,000 Best Solution for People with Sensory Disabilities
This mobile solution assists individuals with hearing disabilities to participate in group discussions. The app works by tracking and transcribing group conversations into text, and displaying not only the text itself, but also who says what.
LOLA: $10,000 Best Social/Emotional Solution
LOLA is an acronym for Laugh Out Loud Aid—a funny digital tool that sends the user reminders to train your brain with social and daily living skills. The concept for the app was developed by a student with Asperger's, with help from his father.
Drumpants: $10,000 Best Solution for People with Communicative and Cognitive Disabilities
The Drumpants device can be worn or attached to a wheelchair, where it provides users with limited mobility, or who have difficulty speaking, with a voice. The user simply taps the device's oversized soft wearable buttons, which act as triggers for speaking customizable phrases through an application on their phone. The device can also be used as a hands-free interface to control door locks, music players, and other devices.
MySupport: $5,000 Best Practices Collaboration Award
MySupport is described by its developers as the Match.com for home-care givers and recipients. It offers people with disabilities and support workers the ability to create a profile, answer match questions, and be connected with compatible users looking to receive or provide support. The software also makes it easy for workers and people with disabilities to keep track of upcoming shifts with text message reminders, and to submit timesheets to Medicaid-vendor agencies for payment.
InstaAid: $5,000 Best Practices Caregiver Award
This iPad app was developed to assist the residents of The Boston Home and other residential facilities to summon a nurse or engage in a video chat with the nurse or other caregiver without having to leave their room.
Braci: $5,000 Best Practices Universal Design Award
Braci uses a Pebble watch paired with an Android phone to recognize 1,000 preprogrammed sounds such as smoke alarms, doorbells, a baby crying, and a car horn. When the app detects one of these sounds it pushes an alert to the user.
Enlight: $10,000 Best Solution Impacting Policy and Society
Enlight is a mobile platform that uses iBeacons to assist with indoor navigation. "When my partner, Catherine Jue, and I began developing Enlight, our goal was to offer specific directions, such as: 'Two steps to the left, then follow the hallway 15 feet to reach the Men's room,'" says Ashwin Kumar. "But then we attended an AT&T sponsored collaboration session at the Berkeley Center for Accessible Technology." Kumar continues: "We spoke with Gus Chalkias and several other blind exemplars, and we learned a lot from them. They explained to us that specific directions were not as important as simply getting a general layout of the venue. If they knew, for example, that a coffee shop's counter was straight ahead, and the seating area was to the left, they could then use their cane and navigate the space more effectively."
Kumar and Jue purchased several iBeacons—tiny, lighthouse-type devices that transmit constant, unique identifiers that, when detected by an iOS device, can trigger an action, such as a social media check-in, coupon offers, or other point-of-interest information.
"Enlight triangulates the iBeacons, similar to the way a GPS device uses satellite position information to calculate location. We use the phone's built-in compass to determine in which direction the user is facing, then offer spoken location and direction information, such as 'Cashier, 12 feet straight ahead.'"
Kumar and Jue's prototype includes an easy-to-use interface that merchants and others interested in improving accessible indoor navigation can use to map their premises by piggybacking on their points-of-interest iBeacons as demonstrated in this described video.
Unfortunately, this was where they hit a technological brick wall.
"Current iBeacons broadcast on the same frequency as other electronic devices, and they are extremely low powered, so that the batteries only need to be changed every few years. This is sufficient to broadcast a coupon or alert a user that the men's department is nearby, but in most cases not sensitive enough to triangulate down to the levels we need to provide trustworthy indoor navigation at an affordable cost to the merchants."
Looking toward the future, the Enlight team is hopeful the next generation of iBeacons will be powerful and inexpensive enough that users will be able to map out a store, conference room or other venue for as little as $2 per beacon. Observes Kumar, "iBeacons may not have been developed for the blind, but they certainly show tremendous potential for assisting in accessible indoor navigation."
Accessible Peak Meter: Large Organization Recognition Award (Non-Monetary)
The Design Patterns for Inclusive Collaboration (DePIC) project at Queen Mary, University of London, aims to develop new ways for people to interact with each other using different senses, and thus reduce barriers caused by visual and other sensory impairments.
"When we interact with others we rely on combinations of the senses we have available to us," says post-doctoral research fellow and project member Oussama Metatla. "For example, when we both see and hear someone speaking, our brain associates the words spoken with the speaker. However, little research has examined how people combine and map information from one sense to another for individuals with sensory impairments."
One of the group's projects is the Accessible Peak Meter. "Many of the individuals who are blind that we work with are musicians and/or sound engineers," says Metatla. "One would assume that working with audio would be a natural fit for the sight impaired, but ironically, the recording industry's embrace of technology has turned sound engineering into an increasingly visual medium.
Cakewalk, Sonar, and other popular digital audio workstations use graphical representations of sound waves and digital peak meters. A peak meter displays the strength of an audio signal. If the signal is too strong, distortion, called clipping, can occur. Consequently, the sound engineer needs to carefully monitor this level on an ongoing basis and keep it from rising into the "red zone."
"Following these digital gauges can be difficult for a blind musician or sound engineer who relies on a screen reader," says Metatla. "By the time the level number has finished voicing, the level has likely already changed. We needed a new, more accurate way to combine the sound of the recording with the visual feedback of a peak meter."
The solution the team arrived at is Accessible Peak Meter: a plug-in that turns digital peak meter readings into real time "sonifiers," non-speech identification sounds that trigger when, say, clipping occurs, or which can run continuously with varying pitches to track the rise and fall of the digital peak meter.
"Users can even set stereo tones to monitor multiple tracks simultaneously," says Metatla. "It's a much more viable solution than trying to monitor both tracks with a screen reader."
For their work thus far DePIC received the Challenge's non-monetary, Large Organization Recognition Award. The open source VST or AU plug-in can be downloaded for free, and there's more to come.
"We've started working on using haptic feedback as an alternative tracking signal," says Metatla. "We also plan to develop and incorporate more complex sound cues so users can accessibly track even more information in real time."
Related Articles:
- AT&T NYU Connect Ability Challenge: Programming for Accessibility by Bill Holton
- A Review of the Odin VI: An Accessible Feature Phone from Odin Mobile by Bill Holton
More from this author:
