Project Eye-Helper An Assistive Technology for Blind Grocery Shoppers
Description
Currently, when a blind person goes grocery shopping, the store management must provide an employee to guide the blind customer and heavily assist with most, if not all, of the shopping. This `dependent shopping' situation often makes the blind person uncomfortable since it calls attention to the handicap and strips him/her of self-sufficiency. The project's motivation is to improve the shopping experience of the blind such that the user can shop independently and efficiently simply by installing new software onto the electronics that they already use daily. This will be done with a combination of crowdsourcing (in which a human will identify the desired grocery item, i.e. object recognition) and computer vision (in which the device will track the item from image to image and navigate the user to the product).