Serenitea: Exploring material-based opportunities and scent integration in Tea Clay for visually impaired inclusive design

Each year, 5.9 million tonnes of tea is consumed worldwide. However, this large consumption of tea also leads to large amounts of tea waste. Approximately 90% of steeped tea is being thrown away. This waste leads to problems such as environmental pollution. In order to combat this issue, Tea Clay was previously developed as a material made from...

Assisting Experts in Image Description for Visually Impaired People

There are an estimated 253 million blind and visually impaired people in the world. To grant them access to text publications that contain images, experts are employed to write image descriptions. There is both a societal and a legislative pressure to supply image descriptions to all new and archived publications within a number of years, yet...

Improving the patient waiting experience in the ophthalmology clinic

This graduation project arose from Erasmus MC’s mission to continuously improve the patient experience. The results of the patient monitoring by Erasmus MC showed that an intervention at their ophthalmology outpatient clinic (OOC) could contribute to this objective. The patient satisfaction scores on wait time experience were very low at this...

Exploring shape memory alloys in haptic wearables for visually impaired people

Wearable haptic assistive devices can provide tactile information to visually impaired people (VIP) to support independent living. However, electromechanical haptic feedback has a number of disadvantages, including hardware being relatively heavy, large, and producing excessive sound. Here, we present a design-driven investigation of the...

Designing for a more accessible zero energy system

In the recent years, many older buildings are being transformed into more sustainable zero-energy housing. However, next to its advantages, there are many challenges that still have to be tackled. One of the main ones is the mismatch between residents’ expectations and systems’ functioning. This report analyses the specific case of a demo...

NavAware: Data-centric design of a user-aware navigation agent for blind mobility

With the rise of digital technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and sensor technologies, all the products we use every day are increasingly becoming ‘intelligent’. Machines, objects, and tools are slowly evolving into robots, objects-with-intent (Rozendaal et al., 2019), and agents. At the same time, their capabilities...

Describing Images to Visually Impaired Users: a Requirement Elicitation Approach

Visually impaired people should enjoy the same rights to acquire information as people with normal sight. Since visual contents become more and more pervasive in our daily life, image description becomes increasingly important to help visually impaired people to get equal access to the information contained in visual contents. However, how to...

Eye Can(t) See Art: Presenting a toolkit for visually impaired and sighted museum visitors to explore 2D art together.

All museum visitors should be able to go to any museum they like and observe the artworks they prefer. For
visually impaired people this is often not the case, even though museums have a social responsibility to make 
their collections accessible for everyone. Especially since the United Nations agreed on the rights of persons with disabilities...

Walkmen: A mobility tool that allows the visually impaired to experience a feeling of autonomy

This thesis is the final result of the graduation project of the master programme Design for Interaction at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft (Delft, The Netherlands). The project is done for the Delft Institute of Positive Design in collaboration with Marten van Doorn from Bartimeus. When glasses or contact lenses are...

Enhancing the television experience of visually impaired people: Designing a tool to improve the ability to follow a conversation in a television program

This thesis is about improving the television experience of visually impaired people (VIP). The company VFO, world leading in assistive technology for VIP, proposed the assignment after finding out that VIP still watch television but do not experience it like sighted users. <br/><br/>First, background information was retrieved by literature...