A Wearable Robotic Object Manipulation Aid for the Visually Impaired

Due to loss of vision, it becomes a challenging task for a visually impaired individual to locate and grasp a target object. This paper presents a hand-worn assistive device that may assist a visually impaired person in detecting a target object and maintaining alignment with the object while approa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2018 IEEE 1st International Conference on Micro/Nano Sensors for AI, Healthcare, and Robotics (NSENS) pp. 5 - 9
Main Authors Liu, Xiaoping, Zhang, He, Jin, Lingqiu, Ye, Cang
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.12.2018
Subjects
Cameras
DC motors
Exoskeletons
Feature extraction
Hand-Worn/Wearable Assistive Device
Object detection
Object Manipulation Aid
Robot sensing systems
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Visual Guidance
Visually Impaired
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DOI10.1109/NSENS.2018.8713628

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Summary:Due to loss of vision, it becomes a challenging task for a visually impaired individual to locate and grasp a target object. This paper presents a hand-worn assistive device that may assist a visually impaired person in detecting a target object and maintaining alignment with the object while approaching it. The device consists of a sensing module and a guiding module. The sensing module uses an RGB-D camera to detect and track the target object. The guiding module computes hand-object misalignment, determines the desired hand movement (DHM) for hand-object alignment, and uses a cable-driven exoskeleton mechanism to guide the user's hand to align with the target object. The guiding module helps to maintain hand-object alignment while the hand is approaching the object. A prototype of the device was developed and its usability was validated by experiments with human subjects.
DOI:10.1109/NSENS.2018.8713628