AiSee: An Assistive Wearable Device to Support Visually Impaired Grocery Shoppers

Fig. 1. PVI have developed special habits to cope with daily tasks, such as grocery shopping. We conducted user Journeys walking us through their daily life to understand their habits and challenges, which revealed grocery shopping as a major problem. We also conducted Structured Interviews at which we elicited requirements an assistive device must fulfill. Based on our findings, we iteratively developed a prototype by constantly involving our target group. Finally, we evaluated the performance of our device for the task of grocery item identification as well as in-the-wild pilot study to see how users would actually interact in a supermarket.

People with visual impairments (PVI) experience simple tasks, such as grocery shopping, to be an essential difficulty. Although the recent emergence of AI-technology has been dramatically improving visual recognition capabilities, the application to the daily life of PVI is still complex and erroneous. For example, image recognition engines require a clear shot of the targeted object and a contextual understanding of the information the user requires. In this paper, we aimed to understand the PVI's needs and their pain points in the task of identifying grocery items. Following a user-centered design process, we iteratively