Empowering Persons with Deafblindness: Designing an Intelligent Assistive Wearable in the SUITCEYES Project

Abstract

Deafblindness is a condition that limits communication capabilities primarily to the haptic channel. In the EU-funded project SUITCEYES we design a system which allows haptic and thermal communication via soft interfaces and textiles. Based on user needs and informed by disability studies, we combine elements from smart textiles, sensors, semantic technologies, image processing, face and object recognition, machine learning, affective computing, and gamification. In this work, we present the underlying concepts and the overall design vision of the resulting assistive smart wearable.