Wireless for the Disabled The Georgia Institute of Technology’s devices aid those with mobility, vision, and hearing impairments. From: Technology Review - December 2003 / January 2004 - page 64 By: Corie Lok The wireless explosion has made cell phones, personal digital assistants, and other devices ubiquitous and has changed the way people communicate and work. It also offers the possibility of changing the lives of disabled people, by helping them overcome or cope with their impairments. The 25 researchers at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Mobile Wireless Technologies for Persons with Disabilities at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made it their mission to realize that possibility. The center is designing wireless aids that target a variety of disabilities, including mobility, vision, and hearing impairments. The researchers use off-the-shelf components to build these systems "so that they’re affordable and available," says John Peifer, the center’s codirector. The center is also trying to influence wireless-device manufacturers to make their existing products more accessible to people with disabilities and to adopt new applications with the needs of the disabled in mind. "Mobile wireless is going to be a big part of the future. There’s a concern that people with disabilities would be left out," says Peifer. -- A team led by Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientist John Peifer wants to enhance the lives of disabled people by designing wireless assistive technologies out of affordable off-the-shelf components. The prototype system devised by Georgia Tech researcher Jack Wood is a wearable captioning device for the hearing-disabled that would allow users to follow dialogue in movies, conferences, or lectures in real time through the wireless transmission of captions to a personal digital assistant (PDA). The user can read the text off the PDA or off of a commercially available mini monitor that can be attached to eyeglasses. Giving vision-impaired people more navigability and independence is the purpose of a product designed by Jeff Wilson consisting of a pair of headphones and a wearable computer controlled by a handheld device; a shoulder strap on the bag housing the computer is outfitted with a GPS sensor, which works in conjunction with a head-tracking sensor on the headphones to track the wearer's location and direction. The computer plays beeps over the phones, and the user moves toward the apparent source of the sound, thus following a preprogrammed route. Tracy Westeyn's "gesture panel," designed for people whose fine motor skills are limited, lets users control household devices by waving their hand in front of the panel, which is equipped with 72 infrared light-emitting diodes arranged in a grid configuration. A camera directed at the panel registers interruptions in the infrared beams concurrent with the gesture, and feeds the data to a laptop, which then triggers a specific device control command. Georgia Tech's Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Mobile Wireless Technologies for Persons with Disabilities, where Peifer and his team work, plans to help wireless-device manufacturers realize the benefits of refining their existing products for the handicapped. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/demo1203.asp