Hello everyone, thank you for your interest in our work.
I’m Kyungjun Lee, and this is joint work with Daisuke Sato, Saki Asakawa, Hernisa Kacorri,
and Chieko Asakawa
from the the University of Maryland, College Park, Carnegie Mellon University, New York
University, and IBM Research.
Our work explores people’s attitudes toward assistive wearable cameras that can detect
pedestrians for blind people.
In this work, we consider two different perspectives, the perspective of blind people who may be
the end users of these technologies
and the perspective of sighted bystanders who may be captured by these cameras.
Wearable cameras hold the promise to increase real-world accessibility for blind people
by providing access to their visual surroundings,
such as daily products, personal objects, and infrastructure.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this wearable technology has been already available for blind people
in the market as commercial products, such as Orcam and Aira.
More importantly, a wearable camera may also be useful to blind users in social interactions
as it can provide them with information about people near them,
such as their approximate distance, relative position, gender, and facial expressions.
However, the public use of such a system may raise privacy concerns for bystanders as the
camera can capture them without their consent or knowledge.
In 2016, Profita et al. tried understanding bystanders’ social acceptance of an assistive
wearable camera.
Their experimental results show that people are more willing to accept a wearable camera
if it is used for assistive purposes for blind people.
In this prior study, however, participants experienced the technology through a video
that focuses on showing how a blind person would be wearing a camera.
In other words, participants were not explicitly taught about what kind of visual information
the technology may capture and process.
Our research work looks at this unexplored area of the relationship between assistive
wearable technology and its social acceptance.
Focusing on a pedestrian detection scenario, we try to understand the assistive wearable
technology from two perspectives, the passerby’s perspective and the blind user’s perspective.
Also, we are interested in how people would be reacting to such technology before and
after they learn more about it.
In our work, two different studies are employed - an online study with videos that show how
blind people could be using such technology,
and the in-person study with a working prototype system that blind people can use to detect
pedestrians.
We first conducted a user study using an online survey platform.
We recruited 206 sighted people via Amazon Mechanical Turk, and their age ranged from
19 to 70.
These sighted participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups.
Two groups respectively watched videos with two different forms of a wearable camera,
which are smart glasses and head-mounted GoPro.
Online participants first watched the passerby perspective video.
This video basically shows how a blind person would be wearing a camera from the passerby’s
perspective.
Letting two groups watch the video showing the different types of camera, smart glasses
versus GoPro,
we first try to see if the camera form factor has an effect on their opinions.
From their responses, we see that GoPro was significantly more noticeable than smart glasses
in terms of the camera visibility.
Perhaps this is not a surprise as GoPro is bulkier than smart glasses.
But, it turns out that people who watched the smart glasses felt significantly more
uncomfortable about this assistive technology than people who watched the GoPro.
In particular, smart glasses seem to make people feel more uncomfortable in public than
the GoPro regardless whether it is recording or not.
One participant who saw the video where the blind user wears smart glasses specifically
said,
“I simply do not like being photographed or captured on video, especially when I'm
not aware of it.
Again, I find it acceptable if it helps blind people to see.
But it still makes me a little uncomfortable.”,
which highlights that people may feel uncomfortable about this technology despite their acceptance.
Almost like anticipating our second stimuli after watching the first video,
another online participant who reported feeling uncomfortable about the smart glasses mentioned,
“I would like to know which information would be collected”.
And that’s exactly what our study showed them next.
Let’s first watch the second video.
We showed them the same scenario, but this time from the blind user perspective exposing
the type of information that the wearable camera captures and notifies the blind user
of.
After showing the second video,
we ask people again about their acceptance, any privacy concerns they may have, and whether
they feel uncomfortable toward this assistive camera.
By keeping the questions identical, we look for a change in their opinions.
The results show that online sighted participants remained positive toward blind people using
a wearable camera for pedestrian detection.
The figure on the right side shows that their responses did not change much even after they
watched the Blind User Perspective video.
However, many participants became more negative toward any other people who may not be blind
using such technology.
Perhaps after learning what the technology can do, participants were more cautious of
their privacy or algorithms making inferences on their appearance.
Last, participants maintained their levels of comfort with the assistive use of a wearable
camera even after they watched the blind user perspective video that shows the scenes behind
the camera.
Now moving on to our second study, where we bring blind and sighted participants to experience
those scenarios in person.
Here, blind participants are given a working prototype for pedestrian detection with smart
glasses that notifies them in near real-time
of the presence, approximate distance, relative position, gender, age, and head pose of a
passerby.
Blind participants walked down in a hallway and are given the task to ask a passerby about
a nearby office number.
On the other hand, sighted participants are simply asked to walk in that hallway coming
from the other side
without knowing that a blind person with a wearable camera may walk by them.
Of course, as per our IRB, sighted participants were aware that they would be recorded.
Please note that this walking activity is designed to serve as an in-person alternative
to the passerby perspective video in the online study.
We recruited 10 blind participants whose age ranged from 49 to 73.
3 participants reported to have light perception, and 4 participants mentioned that they had
prior experience with a wearable camera, such as Aira.
For each blind participant, 4 sighted participants were recruited on site one at a time, so,
in total, we recruited 40 sighted participants for this in-person experiment.
Since we conducted the study on campus, sighted participants’ age, which range from
19 to 39, tended to be a bit younger than that in the online study.
What we also want to see here is whether this in-person experience results in different
opinions than the online learning.
For this comparison, we use the online data with the smart glasses only, as GoPro was
not used for the in-person study.
We find that, if none of the recordings are saved,
then in-person sighted participants are significantly more positive and less uncomfortable toward
smart glasses for blind people.
Though, at this point, they are not yet aware of what kind of information is being captured
by the camera.
After the walking activity and the questionnaire, sighted participants watched the blind user
perspective video.
This is the same video as in the online study, which exposes the type of information that
the wearable camera captures and notifies the blind user of.
Here, sighted participants complete the same questionnaires as before the video.
Similar to the online study,
we observe that sighted participants in this in-person study also remained overall positive
toward blind people using a wearable camera to detect pedestrians.
Similarly, many sighted participants became more negative toward other people than those
who are blind using such technology.
We suspect that, after learning what the technology can do, participants were more cautious of
their privacy or the system that makes inferences on their appearance.
Contrary to the online study,
we notice that in-person participants felt more uncomfortable toward this assistive technology
once they saw what it is doing behind the scenes.
While you can find a more extensive analysis in our paper,
let’s talk for a second about conflicts of interest that may arise between blind users
of this technology and sighted bystanders.
We ask blind participants what kind of visual information they find useful
considering all the visual attributes captured by the working prototype and other attributes.
We also ask sighted participants what kind of their visual information they would not
like to be detected by the assistive camera.
We find that, in many cases, blind and sighted participants are in agreement.
Blind participants find the distance and position of nearby people the most important visual
information,
and sighted participants are OK with this information being captured.
Also, blind participants think that age and ethnicity are the least important information,
which is good since sighted participants would not like those to be inferred.
These findings are exciting because they provide us with a design space that mitigates conflicts
between those affected by this technology.
And our research team is leveraging these findings to develop novel smart glasses applications
for social distancing and managing interactions with pedestrians.
Our study also highlights areas where conflicts may arise.
For example, blind participants would like to know whether someone is looking at them
or not,
which is related to one’s head pose, but here is where sighted participants are not
OK with it.
Moreover, blind participants thought that accessing others’ facial expressions can
help with social interactions,
but sighted participants would not like this to be detected by an assistive system.
Last, coming back to the wearable camera form factor, we see another conflict.
One blind participant specifically mentioned,
“I wouldn’t wear heavier, bulkier smart glasses because it’s more likely to draw
unwanted attention.”
However, some sighted participants said that the camera should be noticeable saying,
“I’m not looking to be recorded without my knowledge,
so it’s important that it is discernible that the blind individual is wearing a camera.”
We believe that this work is critical for navigating social norms and social acceptability
of wearable cameras for blind users
and highlighting concrete next steps in this direction.
We invite you to read our paper for more details and reuse our study design, questionnaires,
and stimuli for your future work.
Please visit the link show on the bottom of this slide for more information about our
user study.
We would like to thank Tzu-Chia Yeh for her illustrations
and our funding agencies, Shimizu Corporation and NIDILRR,
which stands for National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
Thank you!