SelfLens: a personal assistive technology to support the independence of people with special needs in reading information on food items

Grocery shopping or handling food items (e.g. packets, boxes, etc.) can be a very difficult task for people with special needs. Object labels may contain much information that can be difficult to read because the data shown is a lot, and the text is difficult to read by many people. Blind people are unable to get that information autonomously, and many sighted persons (e.g. elderly people and visually-impaired) may have a lot of difficulty in reading labels. Several tools or applications are available on the market or have been proposed in the literature to support this type of activity (e.g. barcode or QR code reading), but they are limited and may require specific skills by the user. Moreover, repeatedly using an application to read label contents or to get additional information on a product can require numerous actions on a touch-screen device. This can make their use inaccessible or unusable for many users, especially while shopping or cooking. In this work, a portable tool is proposed to support people in simply reading the contents of labels and getting additional information, while they are at home or at the shop. Our study aims to propose a portable assistive technology which can be used by everyone both at home and in the shopping, independently from the personal skills and without requiring no smartphone or complex device, and that is a low-cost solution for the user. Such a product could be very useful for the people independence in a period like that one we are living due to the lockdown required by the Covid-19 situation.