By Charles Creekmore

To understand people who live in the murky realm of visual impairment, step into the shoes of a 55-year-old woman recently diagnosed with macular degeneration. You are still adjusting physically and metaphysically to the progressively obscure world of this condition that smears the central retinal tissues responsible for straight-ahead vision. Gradually you are robbed of the ability to read, drive, recognize faces, shop, and do many other daily activities. As your central vision has broken down in recent months, only your peripheral vision remains. What little you can see, you glimpse indirectly, at the corners of your eyes.

Like many visually impaired people, you are fiercely independent and proud, determined not to call attention to yourself. So when you arrive at your neighborhood supermarket driven by a mighty urge for a power breakfast of buckwheat pancakes with real maple syrup and organic sausages, you want to be able to shop without assistance.

The fundamental tool for your independent lifestyle is a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), a common mobile device the size of a pocket calculator. Your PDA hangs around your neck like the glasses dangling from a reference librarian’s neck and serving much the same function. It allows you to see by proxy.

But your PDA is special, having been programmed with a futuristic seeing-eye system created at UMass Amherst, that gives you verbal directions to all the sections, aisles, products, and brand names in your local supermarket. By scanning the space around you, at your leisure, your device tunes in to thousands of radio frequency tags that act as audio beacons, tiny transmitters leading you to your favorite sausage, maple syrup, and pancake mix. The PDA program, getting its directional signals from these tags, then talks you through the bustling aisles of the supermarket so you can shop at your leisure.

Navigation is only part of the system; this seeing-eye network also enables you to “interrogate” each product for its brand name, price, ingredients, nutritional value, and a cornucopia of additional information. In effect, the system endows every item in the store with the power of speech.

Science fiction? Not at all. Katherine Reagan (a so-called “super senior,” or fifth-year double-major in computer systems engineering and computer science) has fabricated a prototype for just such a seeing-eye system that could benefit the 161 million people worldwide who suffer from visual impairment.

Reagan was motivated by these statistics to create her seeing-eye shopping system. “I thought it would help out people and would be a very important project to do,” she says. “My dad’s a firefighter, so I guess it’s intuitive for me. I seem to have inherited his gene for helping people.”

Animated Spaces
This seeing-eye shopping system is one of many similar electronic networks being invented as part of a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) given to Reagan’s mentor, professor Aura Ganz of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE). All this research uses radio frequency identification (RFID) systems for creating “animated spaces,” in which real-world objects communicate with users in order to convey their locations, purposes, functions, and histories.

“The philosophy of animated spaces is based on the Greek concept of an animistic society, in which objects have souls that make them want to convey their purpose to humans,” says Ganz. “If you relate animated spaces to the Greek ideal, the object is essentially baring its soul to you.”

A RFID system consists of radio frequency tags, or transponders, outfitted with small, inexpensive microchips; and a radio frequency reader, or transceiver, within mobile devices such as PDAs, laptop computers, or cell phones. The transponder sends a question by beaming a radio signal, and the product’s answer is transmitted through the reader. In the particular animated space envisioned by Reagan for her seeing-eye shopping system, every product in the supermarket would be tagged, bar-code style, with transponders. (Several large chains already do this to manage inventory.) The PDA can home in on each item and, in essence, read its mind.

The main thrust of Ganz’s grant is to study how RFID can empower supermarkets, museums, monuments, healthcare facilities, campus buildings, and other places to communicate with visually impaired users and reveal the “rich inner lives” of the objects there. Another of the numerous possibilities is what Ganz calls “audiage” (as compared to “signage”), interpretive displays that talk to visually impaired users. For example, audiage in an art museum could describe an adjoining painting by Picasso, talk about the painter’s colorful life, and explain the theories behind Cubism. Such displays would be a boon for art-loving, visually impaired people with some history or some degree of sight.

“I’ve been working on this technology for about twenty years now,” says Ganz. “And my point of view has always been, ‘How can we use it to improve the lives of people?’ What better cause for this technology than to make life easier for the blind?”

Smart RFID systems may offer a host of other applications. Ganz is tracking the myriad possibilities for what she calls “augmented reality systems” that “increase interaction between the physical and digital worlds.”

Imagine, for instance, if every whirring, beeping machine in an emergency room wore a RFID tag that detailed its operation and purpose for medical students.

“Many objects around us have become so sophisticated, it has become almost impossible to learn how to operate them,” says Ganz. “So animated spaces become our medium for having the objects that surround us explain their purpose, their origins, their technology, and how to use them.”

There are millions of objects looking to bare their souls to us. All it takes is a little radio frequency identification, the kind of ingenuity being applied by Ganz and her students, and the will to do it.

Perceiving and Achieving Independence
As part of her graduate studies in electrical and computer engineering, Sumana Mannem had been developing an animated space called “Percept” that’s something of an audio building directory. “We were thinking of Percept from a technical perspective,” says Mannem. But when her team met Carole Wilson, the person who trains visually impaired students to get around campus, “she gave us that very important human perspective.”
Wilson, a Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, has also been advising Ganz and her research team on the needs and perceptions of her clients. “When Carole Wilson came into the picture, it cleared up lots of issues,” says Mannem, who works on both projects.

One of Wilson’s jobs is called “pre-orientation,” a process that arms the visually impaired with a weapon against the stigma of sticking out. Wilson teaches her visually impaired students the most direct route to each room in every building they need to reach. Percept is being designed to be a stigma-free alternative to navigating hallways by rote.

Percept would work much like other animated spaces but specifically addresses the problem of getting directions in a campus building. Suppose a guy named Frank, a legally blind engineering student, arrives at the main entrance of the Knowles building. With the help of his guide dog, Frank walks to a wall “kiosk,” or directory, located in a position consistent for every building on campus. Then Frank runs his fingers across the raised numbers and letters on the directory and chooses his destination. Speaking through Frank’s PDA, the directory tells Frank exactly how to get to the elevator, which floor to exit, and where to go from there.

“Percept would certainly broaden my students’ awareness of what facilities were available to them,” says Wilson. “Percept would give them access to all the facilities in a building and much more freedom of movement.”

Aside from those benefits, Percept would also give them the added independence of rarely having to ask directions or depend upon the kindness of strangers.

Like the other people on the Ganz research team, Mannem brings to this technical work a deeply compassionate nature.

“Percept appealed to that side of me that wants to help people,” says Mannem, who hales from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. “I like this project because it wasn’t totally technical. I have a spiritual guru in India, and he always said, ‘The best form of worship is to serve people.’ So helping people is ingrained in me. This project took my educational and technical background and applied it to my spiritual values.”