Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020

Ergonomic design of school furniture: challenges for the portuguese schools

It can be observed an increased concern about the school classrooms, in particular about the study and design of school furniture fitting the students’ needs and anthropometrics characteristics. The main aim of this study was to perform an anthropometric survey, considering the main anthropometric dimensions and, in accordance, to define the dimensions and characteristics of school furniture for Portuguese students of the 1st education cycle using valuable and validated ergonomic criteria. The analyzed sample includes, so far, 432 students. Obtained results seem to reinforce the need to consider the specificity of the anthropometric characteristics of the Portuguese students by adding an extra size mark for school furniture in a future revision of the corresponding standard.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT