This essay explores new models of the citizen-patient by attending to the post-Revolutionary blind 'voice'. Voice, in both a literal and figurative sense, was central to the way in which members of the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, an institution for the blind and partially sighted, interacted with those in the community. Musical voices had been used by members to collect alms and to project the p...

We introduce PERCEPT system, an indoor navigation system for the blind and visually impaired. PERCEPT will improve the quality of life and health of the visually impaired community by enabling independent living. Using PERCEPT, blind users will have independent access to public health facilities such as clinics, hospitals, and wellness centers. Access to healthcare facilities is crucial for thi...

The study of algorithms to automatically answer visual questions currently is motivated by visual question answering (VQA) datasets constructed in artificial VQA settings. We propose VizWiz, the first goal-oriented VQA dataset arising from a natural VQA setting. VizWiz consists of over 31,000 visual questions originating from blind people who each took a picture using a mobile phone and recorde...

INTRODUCTION To determine the prevalence and identify potentially curable causes of blindness. MATERIAL AND METHODS We analyzed causes of blindness in 808 blind persons, aged from O to 75 years. We classified our findings in 13 categories. RESULTS The least number of blind persons was discovered in children aged from 0 to 15 years (2.4%), as well as in teenagers (3.4%). The number of blind ...

There is no doubt among the members of the CSCW community that awareness is a key issue in the design of successful collaborative software. In many systems awareness mechanisms have been implemented through displaying graphic information over the system's interface. However, this strategy does not apply when the end users of the system are blind people. In this work we report the problems we en...

Localization performance and spatial hearing abilities of blind persons are complex issues. In everyday life we rely on the “fact” that blind people can hear better, without thinking of what “better” means. Localization performance depends on many parameters such as properties of the excitation signal, environmental conditions, individual aspects, and visual influence. Our goal was to create a ...

Approximately 18 million people are blind from cataract in developing countries and this number tends to double every 20 to 25 years. Cataract is curable by a simple surgical procedure. The surgical output is not keeping pace with the growing needs. In rural Sub Saharan-Africa, Morocco, India, Nepal and China, blinding cataract is still frequently treated by traditional techniques of couching, ...

We report a key proof of principle of a new acceleration method [Modeling Employing Limited Data (MELD)] for predicting protein structures by molecular dynamics simulation. It shows that such Boltzmann-satisfying techniques are now sufficiently fast and accurate to predict native protein structures in a limited test within the Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) community-wide bl...

BACKGROUND A recent Dutch mono-centre randomised controlled trial has shown that occupational therapy improves daily functioning in dementia. The aim of this present study is to compare the effects of the Dutch community occupational therapy programme with a community occupational therapy consultation on daily functioning in older people with mild or moderate dementia and their primary caregive...

Background: Blindness, which is potentially avoidable, is a serious public health problem globally. This study was carried out to determine prevalence of bilateral blindness and the utilization of existing eye care facilities by the bilaterally blind. Methods: A randomized cross sectional community-based study. Participants were community members aged 5years and above who were selected from 30 ...