A wearable system for mobility improvement of visually impaired people

Degradation of the visual system can lead to a dramatic reduction of mobility by limiting a person to his sense of touch and hearing. This paper presents the development of an obstacle detection system for visually impaired people. While moving in his environment the user is alerted to close obstacles in range. The system we propose detects an obstacle surrounding the user by using a multi-sonar system and sending appropriate vibrotactile feedback. The system aims at increasing the mobility of visually impaired people by offering new sensing abilities.     

A study to explore the effects of self‐regulated learning environment for hearing‐impaired students

Although computer‐ and Internet‐aided learning for hearing‐impaired students has been a trend in the modern days, a few studies were done to examine their effectiveness in strengthening learning motivation and, in turn, enhancing learning efficiency. This study attempts to establish an interactive self‐regulated learning environment and employs Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction motivation model, hyperlink technology, modular concepts and online learning community to design teaching contents and presentation of teaching materials. An empirical study was conducted to examine the effects of hearing‐impaired students learning motivation and cognitive attitude of learning environment. The results showed that interactive and self‐regulated learning environment could effectively strengthen learning motivation and promote positive learning behaviour in hearing‐impaired students.     

听力障碍辅具系统设计

听力残障占残疾人人口的24.16%。听觉是人类与外界交流的重要渠道之一,为了帮助听觉丧失患者感知语音,设计了一种听力障碍环境感知眼镜。将声音信号转换成光学信号,利用听力障碍者的视觉来弥补听觉,达到环境感知或躲避危险的目的。该系统可用于康复领域,也可应用于智能辅助器具等方面。     

Development and evaluation of computer-aided music-learning system for the hearing impaired

Abstract   A computer-assisted music-learning system (CAMLS) has been developed to help the hearing impaired practice playing a musical melody. The music-learning performance is evaluated to test the usability of the system. This system can be a computer-supported learning tool for the hearing impaired to help them understand what pitch and tempo are, and then learn to play songs thereby increasing their interest in music classes and enhancing their learning performance. The results indicated that CAMLS could enhance hearing-impaired students' learning performance in a music course. A questionnaire survey also demonstrated that the computer-aided method did benefit hearing-impaired students in their music leaning. Actually, this system can also be applied to non-disabled students as a music-supportive tool to help their music learning.     

A multimedia speech learning system for the hearing impaired

The lack (or limited amount) of audio feedback for many persons with hearing disabilities greatly reduces the quality of speech development and use. Current methodologies for the teaching speech techniques are relatively primitive, and generally require the active participation of a therapist. This makes essential practice difficult, time consuming, and expensive for the student. However, using multimedia technology, it is possible to amplify the efforts of the teachers and students for improving the quality of speech. This paper presents a multimedia visualization system that augments the limited hearing capabilities of hearing impaired persons using visual and tactile feedback approaches and provides alternate representations of sound for increasing speech capabilities and reduced learning time. The proposed system has the capability of not only decreasing the learning time for many persons, but can also be adopted for teaching young children correct speech patterns through the use of speech learning games based on the system.     

AudioBrowser: a mobile browsable information access for the visually impaired

Although a large amount of research has been conducted on building interfaces for the visually impaired that allows users to read web pages and generate and access information on computers, little development addresses two problems faced by the blind users. First, sighted users can rapidly browse and select information they find useful, and second, sighted users can make much useful information portable through the recent proliferation of personal digital assistants (PDAs). These possibilities are not currently available for blind users. This paper describes an interface that has been built on a standard PDA and allows its user to browse the information stored on it through a combination of screen touches coupled with auditory feedback. The system also supports the storage and management of personal information so that addresses, music, directions, and other supportive information can be readily created and then accessed anytime and anywhere by the PDA user. The paper describes the system along with the related design choices and design rationale. A user study is also reported.     

Accessible smartphones for blind users: A case study for a wayfinding system

While progress on assistive technologies have been made, some blind users still face several problems opening and using basic functionalities when interacting with touch interfaces. Sometimes, people with visual impairments may also have problems navigating autonomously, without personal assistance, especially in unknown environments. This paper presents a complete solution to manage the basic functions of a smartphone and to guide users using a wayfinding application. This way, a blind user could go to work from his home in an autonomous way using an adaptable wayfinding application on his smartphone. The wayfinding application combines text, map, auditory and tactile feedback for providing the information. Eighteen visually impaired users tested the application. Preliminary results from this study show that blind people and limited vision users can effectively use the wayfinding application without help. The evaluation also confirms the usefulness of extending the vibration feedback to convey distance information as well as directional information. The validation was successful for iOS and Android devices.     

基于云计算下的高校图书馆数据安全策略的探讨

云计算是继网格计算后又一项正在兴起中的技术,它的出现使"互联网上众多的计算机成为一台虚拟超级计算机"的梦想慢慢变成了现实.云计算下高校图书馆的信息安全问题,一方面来自云服务提供商提供的安全保障,另一方面来自高校图书馆的信息安全需求.针对高校图书馆可能面临的安全存储、访问控制、权限管理、数据保密及知识权等信息安全问题,云...     

Improving Web access for visually impaired users

Technology advances and the continuing convergence of computing and telecommunications have made an unprecedented amount of information available to the public. For many people with disabilities, however, accessibility issues limit the impact of such widespread availability. Of the many types of disabilities-mobility, hearing, and learning impairments, for example-vision impairments are most pervasive in the general population, especially among seniors. The world's rapidly aging population is redefining visually impaired, which refers to individuals with low vision (that is, people for whom ordinary eyeglasses, contact lenses, or intraocular lens implants don't provide clear vision), color blindness, and blindness. In 1998, the US Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act, strengthening provisions covering access to government-posted information for people with disabilities. As amended, Section 508 requires federal agencies to ensure that all assets and technologies are accessible and usable by employees and the public, regardless of physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. Most current assistive technologies for visually impaired users are expensive, difficult to use, and platform dependent. A new approach by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), addresses these weaknesses by locating the assistive capability at the server, thus freeing visually impaired individuals from the software expense, technical complexity, and substantial learning curve of other assistive technologies. NLM's Senior Health Web site (http://nihseniorhealth.gov), a talking Web (a Web application that presents Web content as speech to users), demonstrates the approach's effectiveness.     

Enhancing the energy efficiency of wireless-communicated binaural hearing aids for speech separation driven by soft-computing algorithms

Assisted by soft computing methods, the work we present in this paper focuses on the design of energy-efficient algorithms for binaural hearing aids that aim to separate speech from other sounds the hearing impaired person is not interested in. To do this, the right and left hearing aids need to wirelessly transmit to each other some parameters involved in the speech separation algorithm. The problem is that this transmission appreciably reduces the battery life, the most important constrain for designing advanced algorithms in hearing aids. Reducing the number of bits used to represent the parameters to be transmitted will bring down the power consumption, but at the expense of degrading the ability of the system to separate the speech from the other sound sources. Aiming at solving this problem, our approach, based on quantizing the parameters to be transmitted, basically consists in computing the adequate number of quantization bits by means of a combination of neural networks and genetic algorithms in the effort of finding a balance between low bit rate (and thus, low power consumption) and good separation of speech. The results show that even by using only 2 bits/quantized-sample, the quality of the separation is as high as 70% of the limiting non-quantized quality separation factor, which has been found to be 85%.     

Flexible and robust multimodal interfaces for universal access

Multimodal interfaces are inherently flexible, which is a key feature that makes them suitable for both universal access and next-generation mobile computing. Recent studies also have demonstrated that multimodal architectures can improve the performance stability and overall robustness of the recognition-based component technologies they incorporate (e.g., speech, vision, pen input). This paper reviews data from two recent studies in which a multimodal architecture suppressed errors and stabilized system performance for accented speakers and during mobile use. It concludes with a discussion of key issues in the design of future multimodal interfaces for diverse user groups.     

电话举报系统的设计与开发

电话录音和查询系统是现代电信技术与计算机技术高度结合的产物。电话录音和查询系统的设计与开发,关键技术就是把语音信号转换成数字信号然后进行压缩存储,或把压缩的数字信号解压还原成语音信号。语音处理技术越来越广泛受到人们的重视。电话举报系统是集电话录音和查询为一体的语音处理系统。     

移动网络中心云计算存储数据访问安全自动监测系统设计

为了提高移动网络中心云计算存储数据访问和安全监测能力,提出一种基于深度学习和交叉编译控制的移动网络中心云计算存储数据访问安全自动监测系统设计方法。采用混合属性数据模糊加权聚类方法进行移动网络中心云计算存储数据的优化访问控制模型设计,根据云计算存储数据之间的属性相似度进行离散化数值属性分解,提取移动网络中心云计算存储数据的混合属性特征量,根据最小化云存储数据访问成本为代价进行移动网络中心云计算存储数据访问的安全监测。结合深度学习方法进行数据访问的自适应控制,在交叉编译环境下实现云计算存储数据访问安全自动监测系统开发设计。测试结果表明,采用该方法进行移动网络中心云计算存储数据访问的安全性较好,自动化控制能力较强。     

The effect of auditory distraction on the useful field of view in hearing impaired individuals and its implications for driving

This study assessed whether the increased demand of listening in hearing impaired individuals exacerbates the detrimental impact of auditory distraction on a visual task (useful field of view test), relative to normally hearing listeners. Auditory distraction negatively affects this visual task, which is linked with various driving performance outcomes. Hearing impaired and normally hearing participants performed useful field of view testing with and without a simultaneous listening task. They also undertook a cognitive test battery. For all participants, performing the visual and auditory tasks together reduced performance on each respective test. For a number of subtests, hearing impaired participants showed poorer visual task performance, though not to a statistically significant extent. Hearing impaired participants were significantly poorer at a reading span task than normally hearing participants and tended to score lower on the most visually complex subtest of the visual task in the absence of auditory task engagement. Useful field of view performance is negatively affected by auditory distraction, and hearing loss may present further problems, given the reductions in visual and cognitive task performance suggested in this study. Suggestions are made for future work to extend this study, given the practical importance of the findings.     

Development,evaluation and benchmarking of simulation software for biomolecule-based computing

Simulators for biomolecular computing, (both in vitro and in silico), have come to play an important role in experimentation, analysis, and evaluation of the efficiency and scalability of DNA and biomolecule based computing. Simulation in silico of DNA computing is useful to support DNA-computing algorithm design and to reduce the cost and effort of lab experiments. Although many simulations have now been developed, there exists no standard for simulation software in this area. Reliability, performance benchmarks, user interfaces, and accessibility are arguably the most important criteria for development and wide spread use of simulation software for BMC. The requirements and evaluation of such software packages for DNA computing software are discussed, particularly questions about software development, appropriate user environments, standardization of benchmark data sets, and centrally available common repositories for software and/or data.     

网格计算中基于信任度的访问控制研究*

首先给出了网格计算中访问控制的特点和需求,现有的访问控制技术以及分布式授权模型都不能满足网格计算中对访问控制的需求。通过建立实体间的信任关系,在CAS基础上提出了基于信任度的访问控制机制。为了提高资源的利用率提出了Ticket机制。     

一种基于任务角色的云计算访问控制模型

数据安全问题是云计算推广的一大阻碍,主要来源于数据共享带来的安全问题和云服务提供商的超级特权导致的潜在危险。为此,分析云计算中数据存储和用户群体的特点,提出一种基于任务角色的云计算访问控制模型,对不同访问主体采取不同访问控制策略,以提供分级的安全特性,使云服务提供商不再享有超级特权。分析结果表明,该访问控制模型使得云端数据访问安全无须依赖于服务器的绝对可信,为云计算提供了更为可靠的安全特性。     

Ontology-based access control model for security policy reasoning in cloud computing

There are many security issues in cloud computing service environments, including virtualization, distributed big-data processing, serviceability, traffic management, application security, access control, authentication, and cryptography, among others. In particular, data access using various resources requires an authentication and access control model for integrated management and control in cloud computing environments. Cloud computing services are differentiated according to security policies because of differences in the permitted access right between service providers and users. RBAC (Role-based access control) and C-RBAC (Context-aware RBAC) models do not suggest effective and practical solutions for managers and users based on dynamic access control methods, suggesting a need for a new model of dynamic access control that can address the limitations of cloud computing characteristics. This paper proposes Onto-ACM (ontology-based access control model), a semantic analysis model that can address the difference in the permitted access control between service providers and users. The proposed model is a model of intelligent context-aware access for proactively applying the access level of resource access based on ontology reasoning and semantic analysis method.     

网格计算中基于信任度的访问控制研究

首先给出了网格计算中访问控制的特点和需求,现有的访问控制技术以及分布式授权模型都不能满足网格计算中对访问控制的需求。通过建立实体间的信任关系,在CAS基础上提出了基于信任度的访问控制机制。为了提高资源的利用率提出了Ticket机制。     

基于Dialogic的语音信箱系统

本文研究基于Dialogic电话语音卡,开发具有留言及听留言功能的语言信息系统,并给出系统的结构及详细的实施方案,测试表明所开发的语音信箱系统优于传统的语音信箱系统。