Intelligent assistants for handicapped people's independence: case study

This paper presents the first stage of the development of two intelligent assistants for handicapped people's independence. The first intelligent assistant, called Tyflos, will help a blind user to be independent and able to walk and work alone in a 3-D dynamic environment. The system captures images from the surrounding 3-D environment, either by the user's command or in a continued mode, and converts the visual description of each image into a verbal (low or high level) descriptions. With other words the system plays the role of human assistant, who describes to the user the 3-D visual environment. The second assistant, called Koufos, will help a deaf person to be more independent in the living environment by making him/her to visually hear sounds and spoken natural language and assisting him/her to visually learn to speak as well.