Abstract
Grocery shopping or handling food items (e.g. packets, boxes, etc.) can be a very difficult task for people with special needs. Object labels may contain much information that can be difficult to read because the data shown is a lot, and the text is difficult to read by many people. Blind people are unable to get that information autonomously, and many sighted persons (e.g. elderly people and visually-impaired) may have a lot of difficulty in reading labels. Several tools or applications are available on the market or have been proposed in the literature to support this type of activity (e.g. barcode or QR code reading), but they are limited and may require specific skills by the user. Moreover, repeatedly using an application to read label contents or to get additional information on a product can require numerous actions on a touch-screen device. This can make their use inaccessible or unusable for many users, especially while shopping or cooking. In this work, a portable tool is proposed to support people in simply reading the contents of labels and getting additional information, while they are at home or at the shop. Our study aims to propose a portable assistive technology which can be used by everyone both at home and in the shopping, independently from the personal skills and without requiring no smartphone or complex device, and that is a low-cost solution for the user. Such a product could be very useful for the people independence in a period like that one we are living due to the lockdown required by the Covid-19 situation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Al-Khalifa, H.S.: Utilizing QR code and mobile phones for blinds and visually impaired people. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A. (eds.) ICCHP 2008. LNCS, vol. 5105, pp. 1065–1069. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70540-6_159
Chiti, S., Leporini, B.: Accessibility of android-based mobile devices: a prototype to investigate interaction with blind users. In: Miesenberger, K., Karshmer, A., Penaz, P., Zagler, W. (eds.) ICCHP 2012. LNCS, vol. 7383, pp. 607–614. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31534-3_89
Duarte, K., Cecílio, J., Furtado, P.: Overview of assistive technologies for the blind: navigation and shopping. In: ICARCV, pp. 1929–1934. IEEE (2014)
Gharpure, C.P., Kulyukin, V.A.: Robot-assisted shopping for the blind: issues in spatial cognition and product selection. Intell. Serv. Robot. 1(3), 237–251 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-008-0020-9
Kostyra, E., Żakowska-Biemans, S., Śniegocka, K., Piotrowska, A.: Food shopping, sensory determinants of food choice and meal preparation by visually impaired people. Obstacles and expectations in daily food experiences. Appetite 113(5), 14–22 (2017)
Kulyukin, V., Kutiyanawala, A.: Accessible shopping systems for blind and visually impaired individuals: Design requirements and the state of the art. Open Rehabil. J. 3(1) (2010)
Lanigan, P.E., Paulos, A.M., Williams, A.W., Rossi, D., Narasimhan, P.: Trinetra: assistive technologies for grocery shopping for the blind. In ISWC, pp. 147–148. IEEE (2006)
Leporini, B., Buzzi, M.: Home automation for an independent living: investigating the needs of visually impaired people. In: IAT, pp. 1–9. ACM, New York (2018)
López-de-Ipiña, D., Lorido, T., López, U.: Indoor navigation and product recognition for blind people assisted shopping. In: Bravo, J., Hervás, R., Villarreal, V. (eds.) IWAAL 2011. LNCS, vol. 6693, pp. 33–40. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21303-8_5
López-de-Ipiña, D., Lorido, T., López, U.: BlindShopping: enabling accessible shopping for visually impaired people through mobile technologies. In: Abdulrazak, B., Giroux, S., Bouchard, B., Pigot, H., Mokhtari, M. (eds.) ICOST 2011. LNCS, vol. 6719, pp. 266–270. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21535-3_39
Nicholson, J., Kulyukin, V., Coster, D.: ShopTalk: independent blind shopping through verbal route directions and barcode scans. Open Rehabil. J. 2(1) (2009)
Sahasrabudhe, S., Singh, R., Heath, D.: Innovative affordances for blind smartphone users: a qualitative study. In: The 31st Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference Proceedings, San Diego (2016)
Schwarz, T., Rajgopal, S., Stiefelhagen, R.: Accessible EPUB: making EPUB 3 documents universal accessible. In: Miesenberger, K., Kouroupetroglou, G. (eds.) ICCHP 2018. LNCS, vol. 10896, pp. 85–92. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94277-3_16
Yuan, C.W., Hanrahan, B.V., Lee, S., Rosson, M.B., Carroll, J.M.: Constructing a holistic view of shopping with people with visual impairment: a participatory design approach. Univ. Access Inf. Soc. 18(1), 127–140 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-017-0577-1
Zientara, P.A., et al.: Third eye: a shopping assistant for the visually impaired. Computer 50(2), 16–24 (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Galesi, G., Giunipero, L., Leporini, B., Pagliucoli, F., Quatraro, A., Verdi, G. (2020). SelfLens: A Personal Assistive Technology to Support the Independence of People with Special Needs in Reading Information on Food Items. In: Miesenberger, K., Manduchi, R., Covarrubias Rodriguez, M., Peňáz, P. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58796-3_60
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58796-3_60
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-58795-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-58796-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)