Role of AI for Disabled Persons
All it took was a question, “Can machines think?”. Alan Turing with his infamous Turing test, established the foundation of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence, commonly abbreviated as AI, is a technology that allows us to build intelligent systems that mimic human intelligence. The goal of AI is to simulate human intelligence in machines. With the vast amount of data available at our disposal, researchers and engineers across the world have been in the quest of unlocking applications which could create a huge impact in the lives of the people across the world.
Though there are many technological advancements which involves sophisticated systems which are designed and coded by heavy brainstorming and research. Such systems have showcased excellent results, in terms of creating a social media platform, making the applications handle millions of user requests etc. However, there is a subtle difference when it comes to building AI based applications. The rules / software design cannot be programmed with certain assumptions / features in mind, though in doing so, the creation of a system generalized for everyone, is far from reality.
Often, when we see the picture of a person, it takes a few milli-seconds to recognize that person instantly. Researchers have found that our brain has excellent cognitive skills which if harnessed by the computer systems, could produce applications that would improvise itself over the duration of time.
AI allows software to learn automatically from patterns or features in the data by combining massive volumes of data with fast, repeated processing and intelligent algorithms.
In short, AI’s purpose is to create software that can reason and explain based on information. AI will allow humans to engage with software in a human-like manner and provide decision making and support for activities which would otherwise require in-depth domain expertise.
Impact of AI in different sectors:
To facilitate the Artificial General Intelligence, the following are the major subfields, to name a few:
1. Machine Learning
2. Deep Learning
3. Computer Vision
4. Natural Language Processing
There is an overlap in the application scope utilizing the mixture of these fields to create systems which could impact the following sectors: Astronomy, Healthcare, Gaming, Finance, Data Security, social media, Automotive Industry, Education, Entertainment etc.
As you can notice, the list is non-exhaustive and spans almost all the sectors, we could think of. Let us discuss the role of AI for disabled persons.
We as humans are blessed with 5 senses, namely touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. These enable us to sense the environment around us. With the help of our legs, we could move around and commute to place at our own convenience.
However, not everyone is fortunate enough. There are a lot of people with disabilities, some cannot see things, some cannot hear things, some don’t have arms to interact, legs to move around. Such people face difficulties in their daily lives.
When medical procedures cannot help them, it is a question whether technological solutions could improve their lives.
Role of AI for disabled persons:
There have been many advances made, ranging from prosthetic limbs, robotic arms, in-house navigation, and daily planners etc. All these applications are indeed powered by AI. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the lives of disabled people by making it easier to develop interactive technologies that promote physical accessibility and independence.
AI voice assistants like Google Home, Siri, Alexa etc, have created the means to seek information and perform tasks solely by using voice commands. This makes it easier for the disabled individuals to access information with ease, by using their voice to interact with the environment around them.
These AI voice assistant systems possess the capability to learn the user’s voice intents, pronunciation, and style of speaking, thereby increasing the efficiency of the translation systems in the form of text or audio messages. It could also be used by people with speech impairments.
AI-based solutions have been developed to improve the lives of deaf and mute persons easier as technology advances. GnoSys, Google’s AI platform, uses Computer Vision and Deep Learning-based Neural Networks to quickly translate sign language into text and speech.
Google’s DeepMind has utilized the power of AI to caption videos using lip-reading algorithms. This is also used in YouTube and can enable people with hearing problems to fully participate in the entertainment sector.
Artificial Intelligence has the potential to transform the lives of persons with vision impairments as well. AI understands the context of items in images and describes them to people using image recognition technology. Microsoft’s Seeing AI is an excellent example of a computer vision platform that narrates the environment around the visually impaired people by reading words, detecting faces, emotions of the person in front of the application. It also describes the context of the environment.
For example. a blind person sitting in a park, could point the application towards a person with a dog. The application would describe the context as “There is a thin person wearing green T shirt and a brown hat. He is carrying a Labrador dog on a walk.”
These are priceless words of wisdom for a person who cannot see since they trigger images in their minds. The applications make use of object detection, scene recognition, sentence formulation, characterization etc. All of these are complex tasks in themselves, but with the increasing amount of data available at our disposal, such applications are built and improvised with ease.
Smart home devices can enable a person to control their entire home, by switching on/off their electronic devices, adjusting the Air Conditioners, music systems etc. These systems prove to be a life support guide for people since they are always active and a voice command away.
Blind people can read with the help of Braille. Lots of applications are built to teach Braille using gamification and AI based speech recognition.
The importance of personalization:
Personalization of AI-tools has long been a topic of discussion. Because AI machine learning algorithms and categorization require a large amount of data, personalization of any system indeed becomes a difficult process. Personalization can range from a one-of-a-kind group to dividing everyone into numerous groups to the extreme of no personalization, in which everyone receives the same item and is placed in the same group.
For someone with a physical impairment, data-driven personalization and model setup can be difficult because they may not be able to express their preferences independently.
Personalizing technology for a disabled person entails several factors. They may have a variety of strengths and shortcomings that differ from those generally noticed. Some of these environmental factors may be more significant to an individual than others.
The development of speech recognition, speech synthesis, or machine translation for minority languages offers little commercial benefit for corporations. For persons with speech problems, standard voice recognition is useless, necessitating the usage of a specialized system.
Thus, AI through personalization has also helped the disabled in many ways.
Conclusion:
For persons with impairments, AI-powered solutions have the potential to make a significant difference by assisting them in daily activities and allowing them to learn new skills. Aiding disabled persons using AI technology brings up new possibilities for accessibility, social inclusion, and self-sufficiency that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to attain.
It will enable such people to have a healthy social life, apply for jobs, overcome their disabilities to contribute for the betterment of the society. As AI advances, more advanced and inventive solutions for addressing the most difficult challenges encountered by disabled persons and enabling greater inclusion for them may become available.
