Papers by Abhik Chowdhury
HCI International 2020 – Late Breaking Papers: Universal Access and Inclusive Design
For the significant global population of individuals who are blind or visually impaired, spatial ... more For the significant global population of individuals who are blind or visually impaired, spatial awareness during navigation remains a challenge. Tactile Electronic Travel Aids have been designed to assist with the provision of spatiotemporal information, but an intuitive method for mapping this information to patterns on a vibrotactile display remains to be determined. This paper explores the encoding of distance from a navigator to an object using two strategies: absolute and relative. A wearable prototype, the HapBack, is presented with two straps of vertically aligned vibrotactile motors mapped to five distances, with each distance mapped to a row on the display. Absolute patterns emit a single vibration at the row corresponding to a distance, while relative patterns emit a sequence of vibrations starting from the bottom row and ending at the row mapped to that distance. These two encoding strategies are comparatively evaluated for identification accuracy and perceived intuitiveness of mapping among ten adult participants who are blind or visually impaired. No significant difference was found between the intuitiveness of the two encodings based on these metrics, with each showing promising results for application during navigation tasks.
As digital worlds become ubiquitous via video games, simulations, virtual and augmented reality, ... more As digital worlds become ubiquitous via video games, simulations, virtual and augmented reality, people with disabilities who cannot access those worlds are becoming increasingly disenfranchised. More often than not the design of these environments focuses on vision, making them inaccessible in whole or in part to people with visual impairments. Accessible games and visual aids have been developed but their lack of prevalence or unintuitive interfaces make them impractical for daily use. To address this gap, we present Foveated Haptic Gaze, a method for conveying visual information via haptics that is intuitive and designed for interacting with real-time 3-dimensional environments. To validate our approach we developed a prototype of the system along with a simplified first-person shooter game. Lastly we present encouraging user study results of both sighted and blind participants using our system to play the game with no visual feedback.
2018 International Flexible Electronics Technology Conference (IFETC), 2018
The direction of recent research suggests the convergence of digital and biological systems, wher... more The direction of recent research suggests the convergence of digital and biological systems, where researchers designed and engineered technology that share many of the aspects of living organisms. We explore a step towards “growable robotics”, a type of robotic system that has the ability to self-grow either a part of or its whole body into a functional shape with minimal help from the external system. We propose the application of microbial cellulose, as a biological exoskeleton of the electrical system with renewable, self-healing, and shape changing properties. We demonstrate the process of creating the growable robot by prototyping a simple rover inspired by NASA folded origami mechanisms. Finally, we analyze the potential applications based on the properties of the material and suggest the future directions in growable and biological augmented robotics.
Access to real-time situational information at a distance, including the relative position and mo... more Access to real-time situational information at a distance, including the relative position and motion of surrounding objects, is essential for an individual to travel safely and independently. For blind and low vision travelers, access to critical environmental information is unattainable if it is positioned beyond the reach of their preferred mobility aid or outside their path of travel. Due to its cost and versatility, and the dynamic information which can be aggregated through its use, the long white cane remains the most widely used mobility aid for non-visual travelers. Physical characteristics such as texture, slope, and position can be identified with the long white cane, but only when the traveler is within close proximity to an object. In this work, we introduce a wearable technology to augment non-visual travel methods by communicating spatial information at a distance. We propose a vibrotactile device, the HaptWrap, equipped with vibration motors capable of communicating ...
This paper introduces a novel haptic interface for use as a general-purpose sensory substitution ... more This paper introduces a novel haptic interface for use as a general-purpose sensory substitution device called the Low Resolution Haptic Interface (LRHI). A prototype of the LRHI was developed and tested in a user study for its effectiveness in conveying information through the sense of touch as well as for use in interactive applications. Results are promising, showing that participants were able to accurately discriminate a range of both static and dynamic haptic patterns using the LRHI with a composite accuracy of 98.38%. The user study also showed that participants were able to sucessfully learn to play a completely haptic interactive cat-mouse game with the device.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an elusive and highly pathogenic ag... more Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an elusive and highly pathogenic agent, has resulted in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affecting numerous populations worldwide. New studies investigating the tenacity of SARS-CoV-2 have highlighted its ability to persist on a myriad of surfaces for several days, including gowns and shoes. As a result, there is a global need for sterilization of a variety of potentially-contaminated items, ranging from clothing to personal protective equipment like face coverings. To this end, we have designed and constructed a cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable sterilization system that uses ozone gas to inactivate viral particles. We sought to determine the efficacy of the system in the sterilization of viral particles as well as its ability to sterilize N95 respirators for reuse. N95 respirators inoculated with P22 bacteriophage and sterilized in the ozone system showed a 6-log10 reduction in viral load when treated at 25 ppm for...
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an elusive and highly pathogenic ag... more Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), an elusive and highly pathogenic agent, has resulted in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affecting numerous populations worldwide. New studies investigating the tenacity of SARS-CoV-2 have highlighted its ability to persist on a myriad of surfaces for several days, including gowns and shoes. As a result, there is a global need for sterilization of a variety of potentially-contaminated items, ranging from clothing to personal protective equipment like face coverings. To this end, we have designed and constructed a cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable sterilization system that uses ozone gas to inactivate viral particles. We sought to determine the efficacy of the system in the sterilization of viral particles as well as its ability to sterilize N95 respirators for reuse. N95 respirators inoculated with P22 bacteriophage and sterilized in the ozone system showed a 6-log10 reduction in viral load when treated at 25 ppm for...
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Papers by Abhik Chowdhury