[Colorado-Talk] OKO App Leverages AI To Help Blind Pedestrians Recognize Traffic Signals

Sat Sep 16 22:23:19 UTC 2023

>From Forbes.com

August 10, 2023

Original Source
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2023/08/10/oko-app-deploys-ai-to-ma
ke-crossing-the-street-safer-for-blind-pedestrians/?sh=1b4d249d687b> 

OKO App Leverages AI To Help Blind Pedestrians Recognize Traffic Signals

By Gus Alexiou, Contributor

Imagine living in fear every time you have to cross a busy street. This is
an everyday reality for thousands of visually impaired pedestrians around
the world who have not received highly specialist orientation and mobility
training or may simply live in one of the many towns and cities across
America with an insufficient number of accessible pedestrian crossings.

Indeed, at the end of 2020, in response to a class action lawsuit filed
against the New York City Department of Transportation by Disability Rights
Advocates on behalf of the American Council of the Blind of New York, a
federal court ruled that the city had violated the civil rights of many of
its inhabitants with disabilities by failing to install accessible
pedestrian signals.

During the proceedings, it was identified that only 443of the city's 13,200
signalized intersections (less than4%) were accessible to visually impaired
Pedestrians via audible and tactile features.

AI-powered navigation

Though clearly an issue that is only substantially addressable through
long-term investment in accessible civic planning, New York-based startup
AYES has demonstrated its commitment not to leave blind pedestrians stranded
on the other side of the street through the launch of its OKO smartphone app
earlier this year.

OKO uses a combination of artificial intelligence trained on images of
thousands of crossings and the phone camera itself to circumvent the absence
of localized audio and haptic cues by notifying the user as to whether the
street is safe to cross directly through their phone.

OKO's launch follows a trend seen throughout 2023, the year of ChatGPT, of
AI being deployed more and more commonly to solve complex real-world
on-the-fly accessibility issues such as object recognition and rapid
processing of complex information. In a sight-impaired context, an example
of this can be seen in the integration of ChatGPT with Envision smart
glasses
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/gusalexiou/2023/04/30/envision-adds-chatgpt-ai
-sight-assistance-to-its-smart-glasses-for-the-blind>  for the blind.

To safely traverse, users of the OKO app which is currently only available
on iOS, simply need to scan their phone across an intersection and wait for
the camera to identify the pedestrian crossing signal on the other side.
Once the signal has been interpreted as safe to cross the app can notify
users in several different ways including an on-screen visual overlay for
the partially sighted or audio feedback and vibrations for those with more
profound sight loss. A slow rhythm signifies DON'T WALK, the faster rhythm
indicates WALK and the intermediate rhythm indicates a countdown.

Important additional benefits include the ability for OKO to work entirely
offline without a data connection and a feature that signals to users when
they appear to be veering to the side rather than crossing in a straight
line.

OKO, which was launched by AYES in the U.S. back in March recently
celebrated the milestone of assisting visually impaired pedestrians to
safely navigate One million intersections. The app is currently also
available in Japan, Spain and Belgium.

OKO is the brainchild of Belgian entrepreneurial trio and company
co-founders Willem Van de Mierop and brothers Michiel and Vincent Janssen
who hail from A country with such progressive views on the provision of
assistive technology that purchases of iPhones by citizens with disabilities
are reimbursed by the Belgian government on account of the device's advanced
accessibility features.

However, the business partners' direct inspiration for devising their
solution came from listening to the experiences of a mutual blind friend who
spoke Of  the difficulties he routinely encountered in crossing
intersections where no audio speaker was installed.

Recounting the early thought process behind starting OKO two years ago, Van
de Mierop says, "We figured if a Tesla can now drive down the highway fully
autonomously - then why can't we do something similar to help a visually
impaired person navigate on the sidewalk?"

The secret sauce to make this a reality is, of course, AI and, particularly
in a U.S. context where there are many different styles of crossing
indicators Depending on the geographical state, a painstaking amount of
legwork went into feeding the proprietary algorithm the necessary quantity
and variety of traffic signal images to develop the data model.

"The beauty of the age of AI and computer vision that we've entered into is
that it has only just now started becoming possible to run these types of
complex And powerful AI algorithms locally on a phone," Van de Mierop
explains.

Dangers of overreliance

Stepping off the AI hype train for a moment though, the company is keen to
emphasize that OKO is not meant to be a replacement for specialized
orientation and mobility training, a guide dog or a white cane, indeed, for
any of the strategies that blind people commonly deploy when navigating
outside. Instead, the app is intended to be a supplementary technology-based
tool within a veritable toolbox of differing solutions and approaches to
tackling everyday problems that visually impaired people rely on. As such,
the company is keen to work closely alongside O&M trainers moving forwards.

Nor should this emergence of novel cutting-edge technology that can help
empower marginalized groups be used as an excuse by urban planners not to
live up to their universal accessibility commitments in the misguided hope
that smartphones and AI can just do the hard yards instead.

It is a viewpoint strongly supported by Haben Girma, a celebrated disability
justice lawyer, author and public speaker who became the first DeafBlind
person to graduate from Harvard Law School in 2013. Girma, who has had her
contribution to the disability rights movement recognized by the likes of
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel, has also
undertaken advanced testing of the OKO app herself.

She fears that, in the future, an overreliance on AI and technology risks
opening up new frontiers in disability discrimination.

"Non-disabled people have a consistent and reliable means of safely
navigating intersections without needing to have a smartphone. So to demand
that blind people have to always be carrying a phone to cross the road just
wouldn't be fair. That's aside from the obvious limitations of batteries and
just plain affordability," says Girma.

"Ideally, what we need is a combination of physically accessible pedestrian
signals that don't require any phones but are supplemented by apps that can
provide additional support. At the crux of all of this is blind people
receiving appropriate O&M training.

Unfortunately, in the United States, as is the case in many other countries
- most visually impaired individuals do not have access to O&M training."

Fortunately, in AYES there appears to be a company that is able to take a
balanced approach towards the limitations but still tantalizing
opportunities for AI and computer vision in the realm of accessible and
equitable urban navigation.

The company has already begun setting its sights on other areas of unmet
need for visually impaired pedestrians such as identifying bus numbers.
Whilst this may help address a significant pain point for the blind and
partially sighted, urban planners commissioning and testing talking bus
stops should certainly ensure their pace doesn't slacken despite the
continuing and rapid advancements of pocket-sized AI.

Cordially,

Curtis Chong

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