TIRESIA · Technology for visual Impairments Rehabilitation on Early-life through Social Information Augmentation
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-09-01 → 2024-08-31
- EU contribution
- €251,003
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Technology for visual Impairments Rehabilitation on Early-life through Social Information Augmentation
Considering that vision is an extremely important sensory modality in humans, visual impairments (VI) influence most instrumental and social activities of daily living, affecting overall quality of life. In the vast majority of cases, both if the visual impairments are caused by peripheral or cerebral lesions of the visual system, individuals with VI retain some degree of vision. Though visual disorders are less frequent in children than in adults, it is especially important to timely assess the presence of a vision’s impairment in order to program an early intervention. Indeed, problems in visual functioning affect the child’s overall development. Therefore, early planning of a visual rehabilitation therapy is crucial to improve the child’s functional vision and facilitate the development in all areas right when the brain plasticity is maximal and key competencies are developing. The aim of this action was to contribute to connect advances in neuroscience and machine learning to study the impact of VI on key functional competencies and improve treatment strategies. Specific objectives were focusing on exploiting machine learning techniques both to investigate how visual impairments at an early age affect the development of social skills, and to develop novel tools for their training, in the context of visual rehabilitation. The ultimate goal was that of generating knowledge and data useful to develop technologies that enhance residual skills of visually impaired people and facilitate their social inclusion, independence and equal opportunities in the society. Results allowed to characterize social skills and social attention of children and adults in tasks related to emotion inference from facial expressions and classification of social interactions from videos. Specifically, a custom dataset of videos was developed, where two simple agents were performing goal-oriented actions and social interactions (help, hinder or no interaction). Differences were analyzed in terms of age (testing groups of children on different age ranges and adults), and condition (testing groups of children with visual impairments, autism spectrum disorders and typically developing children), to characterize the effect of development as well as the effect of low-level sensory issues and high-level cognitive issues on visual social attention and social skills.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The goal of the TIRESIA project is to implement a novel visual assistive technology that augments the residual sight of visually impaired (VI) individuals, with focus on children, enhancing their access to socially relevant information from visual input. Such a technology is intended to provide: i) an assistive function, based on augmented reality (AR) to automatically increase the saliency of socially relevant visual information, and ii) a rehabilitative function, improving long-term VI subjects’ attention to social visual cues. The TIRESIA goal reflects the need for a timely intervention in the impairments of social and interactive skills associated with a visual deficit, especially in early life when such skills are developed and before atypical patterns emerge.The project will be implemented throughout three main steps: 1) development of visual filters for social enrichment, exploiting end-to-end learning of visual transformations based on deep networks, 2) integration of the visual filters on AR glasses, and finally 3) validation of the approach at the neuroscientific level on a large sample of VI adults and children. These goals will be achieved thanks to the transfer of knowledge among the partner (MIT) and the host (IIT) institutions, involving advanced expertise in computer vison, neuroscience, visual rehabilitation, as well as solid scientific and clinical collaboration networks.TIRESIA has a strong interdisciplinary nature and a high applicative potential. It is expected to have an impact: at the scientific level, by introducing an innovative approach to visual assistive technologies based on computer vision; at the individual level, in terms of enhanced career prospects of the experienced researcher; at the organisation level, starting a novel scientific collaboration among the partner and host institutions; and finally, at the societal level, contributing to promote inclusion and better quality of life for impaired individuals.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA · GenovaCoordinatorItaly
- MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · CambridgeUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union