Artificial Intelligence’s impact on the Lives of People with Disabilities

The 21st century has made many impossible things possible. It has taken us to a day where the physically impaired walk and the deaf hears and responds. It is not a miracle, but technology is making extraordinary changes. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), about 15% of the world's population (over one billion people) have some kind of disability. It is not a good idea to have people guide and help them throughout their life. Fortunately, technology has come to their rescue. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. With the help of AI and its applications, people with disabilities can live normal life like everybody. Unlike others, people with disabilities see artificial intelligence as a light at the end of the tunnel. In the developing era of technology, the gap between people with disabilities and the world keeps narrowing.

Artificial intelligence directly impacts disabled people's lives in three ways- enabling communication, enhancing accessibility, and providing the advantage to live independently. People with no disabilities might take Alexa, Echo, and Siri as a device that plays songs, book tickets, tell weather conditions, etc for us. But for people with disabilities, these voice-assisted AI technologies are one of the major advanced ways of communication. Visually impaired people use voice assistants to communicate with the world. Similarly, speech-to-text transcriptions and text-to-speech conversions are also availed for impaired people to address their physical issues. Accessibility is a major concern for people with disability. A person in a wheelchair or a visually impaired individual can't travel to certain places without the help of others. However, an advanced navigation system tracks locations and says where a wheelchair can be easily accessible. Meanwhile, visually impaired people use recognition technology to identify what is around them, especially, signboards, traffic signal color, zebra crossing, etc. The smart home is a futuristic technology that is seeing high adoption among people in recent days. Fortunately, the AI-assisted devices in a smart home enable people with disability to live independently.

While a lot of AI applications are deployed at various places to make people with disabilities live normal life, some of the technologies have direct positive impacts on them. AI solutions leverage more than just comfort. It makes an absolute environment where impaired people can show equal potential to others. AI-powered applications are able to equate visually or physically impaired workers with the rest of the employees by giving them an opportunity to even operate in the workplace.  A sophisticated device called Orcam My Eye 2 is capable of reading books, recognizing faces, and even recognising the value of money and some other common items. This advanced device uses technologies such as AI, OCR (optical character recognition), and machine learning. Extended Reality (XR) is an emerging umbrella term for all immersive technologies like augmented reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). By availing of XR, people with motion disabilities can carry out assignments and work tasks remotely. Robots also play a big role in helping people with disabilities. Starting from robotic arms and prosthetic legs to assistant vehicles and automatic devices mounted on wheelchairs, robotics is remarkably making its stance. ReWalk company, a well-known health technology provider makes robotic products and services that help in rehabilitation.

Tech giants like Microsoft and Google are also taking initiatives to aid impaired people. Google's recent work named 'Project Euphonia' is using speech recognition technology to better understand people with diverse speech patterns. This project focuses on providing more advanced technology than Google Home and Google Assistant. Voice recognition technology is capable of identifying a general mode of speech. But when it comes to recognizing the speech of impaired people, they still need improvement. This is due to the fact that speech recognition algorithms have heard million of examples from people whose voices sound typical. Project Euphonia is addressing this lack of input issue by gathering enough voice recordings from people with speech impairments to train speech recognition models to better understand diverse speech patterns. Google software turns recorded voice samples into a spectrogram or a visual representation of sound. The computer then uses transcriptions of these spectrograms to train the system to better understand less common types of speech patterns.

Microsoft's AI for Accessibility initiative is a US$25 million program that aims to accelerate the development of accessible and intelligent AI solutions. It invites developers, NGOs, academics, researchers, and investors to share their ideas and give them access to Microsoft's cloud and AI platforms to create and test new AI solutions. Microsoft has so far created three concrete AI-mechanism based on the research. The 'Seeing AI app' by Microsoft narrates to people with low vision of the world around them. The app can also read out typed or handwritten text when it appears in front of the camera, give audio beeps to identify products, recognize currencies and colors and, recognize people and their emotions by using facial recognition. 'Helpicto' is another application by Microsoft. The company has partnered with Equadex, a software engineering telecommunications, and computer systems company. This application helps children with autism to communicate with their environment. Microsoft Translator allows students to learn with the same level of care while the AI uses an advanced form of automatic speech recognition to convert raw spoken language.

Other than the major tech players, small companies and start-ups are also dedicating their efforts to making AI-powered devices that can simplify life for people with disability. CloudMind, a Chinese organization has designed a cycling helmet-like device, which uses sensors and cameras to map its environment, sending information to a cloud server to be processed by AI technology. Blind people can benefit from it as it navigates streets, recognize objects, and negotiate traffic lights and crossing. The researchers at Columbia University, New York are working on a 'cognitive hearing aid' that monitors the brain activity of users to identify which voice the listener is focusing on.

Even though technology directly aids disabled people in many ways, there is an unspoken side that needs attention. Recently, people are becoming more aware of the bias technology is carrying on its back. Researchers and scientists are working to mitigate the issue of discrimination based on age, gender, race, and disability. Unfortunately, the bias on disability is not getting as much attention as the rest of the three. To alleviate the issue, IBM is making Accessibility Research that is exploring the topic of fair treatment for people with disabilities in AI systems. With IBM taking the lead, the tech world will soon realize that not just innovations, even equal treatment is a part of AI that needs importance.