AIDEN: Design and Pilot Study of an AI Assistant for the Visually Impaired

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Marquez-Carpintero, Luis, Gomez-Donoso, Francisco, Bauer, Zuria, Dominguez-Dager, Bessie, Belmonte-Baeza, Alvaro, Pina-Navarro, Mónica, Morillas-Espejo, Francisco, Escalona, Felix, Cazorla, Miguel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Marquez-Carpintero, Luis
Gomez-Donoso, Francisco
Bauer, Zuria
Dominguez-Dager, Bessie
Belmonte-Baeza, Alvaro
Pina-Navarro, Mónica
Morillas-Espejo, Francisco
Escalona, Felix
Cazorla, Miguel
author_facet Marquez-Carpintero, Luis
Gomez-Donoso, Francisco
Bauer, Zuria
Dominguez-Dager, Bessie
Belmonte-Baeza, Alvaro
Pina-Navarro, Mónica
Morillas-Espejo, Francisco
Escalona, Felix
Cazorla, Miguel
contents This paper presents AIDEN, an artificial intelligence-based assistant designed to enhance the autonomy and daily quality of life of visually impaired individuals, who often struggle with object identification, text reading, and navigation in unfamiliar environments. Existing solutions such as screen readers or audio-based assistants facilitate access to information but frequently lead to auditory overload and raise privacy concerns in open environments. AIDEN addresses these limitations with a hybrid architecture that integrates You Only Look Once (YOLO) for real-time object detection and a Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA) for scene description and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A key novelty of the system is a continuous haptic guidance mechanism based on a Geiger-counter metaphor, which supports object centering without occupying the auditory channel, while privacy is preserved by ensuring that no personal data are stored. Empirical evaluations with visually impaired participants assessed perceived ease of use and acceptance using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Results indicate high user satisfaction, particularly regarding intuitiveness and perceived autonomy. Moreover, the ``Find an Object'' achieved effective real-time performance. These findings provide promising evidence that multimodal haptic-visual feedback can improve daily usability and independence compared to traditional audio-centric methods, motivating larger-scale clinical validations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_06080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AIDEN: Design and Pilot Study of an AI Assistant for the Visually Impaired
Marquez-Carpintero, Luis
Gomez-Donoso, Francisco
Bauer, Zuria
Dominguez-Dager, Bessie
Belmonte-Baeza, Alvaro
Pina-Navarro, Mónica
Morillas-Espejo, Francisco
Escalona, Felix
Cazorla, Miguel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
This paper presents AIDEN, an artificial intelligence-based assistant designed to enhance the autonomy and daily quality of life of visually impaired individuals, who often struggle with object identification, text reading, and navigation in unfamiliar environments. Existing solutions such as screen readers or audio-based assistants facilitate access to information but frequently lead to auditory overload and raise privacy concerns in open environments. AIDEN addresses these limitations with a hybrid architecture that integrates You Only Look Once (YOLO) for real-time object detection and a Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA) for scene description and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A key novelty of the system is a continuous haptic guidance mechanism based on a Geiger-counter metaphor, which supports object centering without occupying the auditory channel, while privacy is preserved by ensuring that no personal data are stored. Empirical evaluations with visually impaired participants assessed perceived ease of use and acceptance using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Results indicate high user satisfaction, particularly regarding intuitiveness and perceived autonomy. Moreover, the ``Find an Object'' achieved effective real-time performance. These findings provide promising evidence that multimodal haptic-visual feedback can improve daily usability and independence compared to traditional audio-centric methods, motivating larger-scale clinical validations.
title AIDEN: Design and Pilot Study of an AI Assistant for the Visually Impaired
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computers and Society
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06080