A smart watch-based gesture recognition system for assisting people with visual impairments

Modern mobile devices provide several functionalities and new ones are being added at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately browsing the menu and accessing the functions of a mobile phone is not a trivial task for visual impaired users. Low vision people typically rely on screen readers and voice commands. However, depending on the situations, screen readers are not ideal because blind people may need their hearing for safety, and automatic recognition of voice commands is challenging in noisy environments. Novel smart watches technologies provides an interesting opportunity to design new forms of user interaction with mobile phones. We present our first works towards the realization of a system, based on the combination of a mobile phone and a smart watch for gesture control, for assisting low vision people during daily life activities. More specifically we propose a novel approach for gesture recognition which is based on global alignment kernels and is shown to be effective in the challen...