Projects

The ability to navigate safely and confidently is a fundamental requirement for independent travel and access to many settings such as work, school, shopping, transit and healthcare. Navigation is particularly challenging for people with visual impairments, who have limited ability to see signs, landmarks or maps posted in the environment.

This project aims to do a detailed analysis of the environmental acoustic cues that help some blind navigate successfully.

In this project we try to gain a better understanding of what visual strategies people use to gather information in the world.

Successful navigation requires the development of an accurate and flexible mental, or cognitive, map of the navigational space and of the route trajectory required to travel from the current to the target location. The Cognitive-Kinesthetic (C-K) Rehabilitation Training that we have developed in the preceding period utilizes a unique form of blind memory-guided drawing to develop cognitive mapping to a high level of proficiency.

We propose a multidisciplinary approach to effective spatiomotor rehabilitation in blindness and visual impairment. For those who have lost vision, the eye-hand coordination normally available for the manipulation of objects for everyday activities is unavailable and has to be replaced by information from other senses

Automated algorithmic description (AAD) uses existing machine-vision techniques to automate specific aspects of description such as camera motion, scene changes, face identification, and the reading of printed text. Such events could be identified by computer routines that automatically add annotations to the video.

The goal of this project is to test a hypothesis that whether or not training patients to pay more attention to the input from the amblyopic eye can overcome interocular suppression to treat amblyopia.

TBD.