Helping Hands versus ERSP Vision: Comparing Object Recognition Technologies for the Visually Impaired

A major challenge for people with vision impairments ranging from severely low visual acuity to no light perception (NLP) is identifying or distinguishing the difference between objects of similar size and shape. For many of these individuals, locating and identifying specific objects can be an arduous task. This paper explores the design and evaluation of the “Helping Hand”: A radio frequency identification (RFID) glove that audibly identifies tagged objects. In this paper we describe the design of a wearable RFID apparatus used for object identification. We evaluated the effectiveness of the glove by conducting a three-arm randomized controlled study. In our experiment, we compare a baseline (no assistive device), RFID (Helping Hand) and computer vision (ERSP Vision Software) in identifying common household objects. We also administered a questionnaire to obtain subjective data about the usability experience of the participants. Our experimental results show a reduction in the amount of time required to identify objects when using the Helping Hand glove versus the other two methods.