Research on intelligent walkers aims at helping elderly individuals to maintain their independence in familiar and unfamiliar environments. Several walkers have been developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. This article contributes to this research venue by describing the design and initial evaluations of iWalker, a multi-sensor rollator-mounted wayfinding system for the elderly. The primary difference of the proposed navigation aid from other intelligent walkers is that iWalker is assumed to operate in a smart world (SW), a physical space equipped with embedded sensors. By integrating inexpensive sensors into the environment, the cost and complexity of the walker can be reduced.

Independent grocery shopping is one of the most functionally challenging tasks for visually impaired and blind individuals. Many assistive shopping systems have been developed to address the problem of blind grocery shopping. In this article, we identify several design requirements for assistive shopping systems and analyze existing approaches to see how well they meet them. Our objective is to shed some light on possible research and development directions for the accessible blind shopping community and to offer designers of accessible shopping solutions evaluation tools that can be used as initial points of comparison.

Supermarkets are one of the most functionally challenging environments for visually impaired (VI) individuals. A modern supermarket has a median area of 4,529 square meters and stocks an average of 45,000 products. We will demonstrate ShopMobile II, a mobile shopping system for VI individuals. ShopMobile II is implemented on the Google Nexus One smartphone. We will demonstrate how haptic and audio interfaces augment simple vision techniques. We will also demonstrate an interactive haptic feedback loop to align the phone's camera with fixed surfaces in the pitch and yaw planes. The estimated duration of the demonstration is fifteen minutes.

We will demonstrate the iWalker, a three-sensor rollatormounted wayfinding system for the elderly with cognitive and visual impairments. Unlike several previous and ongoing research efforts, iWalker emphasizes a smart world (SW) perspective. A SW is a physical space equipped with embedded sensors. One implication of the SW perspective is the simplification of the onboard computing machinery needed to make iWalker operational.

Abstract-In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient approach to localizing the barcode regions in an image. We first apply the multichannel Gabor filtering technique to extract eight directional texture features. We then apply a randomized hierarchical search strategy to quickly find a sufficient number of pairs of line segments, which have high frequency and high similarity measures. We finally employ the histogram analysis technique on the start and end points of each qualified pair of line segments to localize the barcode regions. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the two peer systems and can successfully localize the barcode regions in an image with a precision of 96% and a recall of 86%. In addition, the proposed system can be easily ported to a cell phone to improve the ShopTalk system to aid the blind to successfully retrieve common grocery products.Index Terms-Barcode localization, multichannel Gabor filters, longest common subsequence, randomized hierarchical search strategy