iCare - a user centric approach to the development of assistive devices for the blind and visually impaired

There are approximately 10 million blind and visually-impaired persons in the United States. As the information economy accounts for a larger percent of jobs, people who are blind face barriers when competing for jobs that require vision to access, absorb, and use information. While much research effort has been expended toward developing assistive devices for the blind, many of the technological solutions proposed are unworkable. Many of these assistive devices fall short of meeting the needs of users, and sometimes even create more problems than they solve. In order to avoid repeating these mistakes, a user-centric approach is vital to the design of assistive devices. This paper describes our own efforts to develop and employ such a design methodology in the iCare project. In this project, the research efforts are being focused on those problems that will have the greatest impact on the day-to-day life of the user, and that are technologically feasible.