ColourSpecs: A Wearable Colour Identification System for People with Impaired Colour Vision

RESEARCH CONTEXT
Impaired Colour Vision (ICV, colour vision deficiency, colour blindness) can be inherited or acquired. Inherited ICV affects 1/12 men and 1/200 women in the UK, affecting 2.7m people of all ages. Acquired ICV might affect as many as 2/3 of people over 65 years in the UK (6.9m).

ICV manifests as a reduced ability to discriminate between colours. Inherited ICV typically reduces the ability to differentiate between colours that differ only in their amounts of red or green (e.g., orange & green, blue & purple). Acquired ICV typically reduces blue-yellow discrimination (e.g., green & blue, red & purple).

Being unable to differentiate colours results in three key challenges for people with ICV:
1) Employment: People with ICV are prohibited from serving in the military, police and fire services, and from operating trains, boats, and aircraft. Many other careers can be difficult without accurate colour vision, e.g., graphic/web design, security, dentistry, meat inspection.
2) Health & Safety: Many medications are distinguished only by colour and people with ICV often have difficulty detecting a burn or rash. Likewise, it is challenging to see if meat is sufficiently cooked and to identify when food has gone 'off'.
3) Information Access: Data is increasingly presented using colour (e.g., weather reports, news articles, election coverage, website form warnings), reducing the accessibility of this information for people with ICV.

The implications of these challenges are far-reaching: occupations have a reduced pool of otherwise competitive potential recruits causing difficulties for recruiters and frustration for would-be recruits; people with ICV experience day-to-day challenges that threaten their health & safety and impede their ability to participate in the information society.

The dominant Assistive Technology (AT) for ICV for 20 years has been recolouring tools, which modify colours to make them more differentiable for people with ICV. However, recolouring tools often 1) create new colour problems, 2) destroy naturalness, and 3) prevent colour identification. These limitations arise from recolouring's central focus on colour differentiation, however the ICV challenges identified above all stem from the inability to identify colours. Colour identification is the key challenge for people with ICV.

AIMS & OBJECTIVES
Building on our 3*/4* CHI 2015 Best Paper (Flatla, et al., 2015), we will expand on the preliminary colour visualisation techniques presented there by defining a comprehensive colour-to-visual design space using participants with ICV. With our participants we will identify the best candidate mappings and implement them on a transparent Head-Mounted Display (HMD) to develop ColourSpecs, and compare it to competing techniques. To help educate the public on ICV and ColourSpecs, we will create visual art that encodes different messages for different colour vision abilities, and use ICV simulation software and ColourSpecs to allow attendees to experience different colour vision.

APPLICATIONS & BENEFITS
People with ICV in Dundee & Tayside will benefit from learning about existing and new technology available to help them, and will also benefit from gaining experience in describing their condition to help people with typical colour vision understand ICV.

We will commercialise our ColourSpecs prototype through our commercial partner since 2014, AmplifEye.Vision, who will share their prototype system with us, meet monthly to discuss commercialisation, and plan to fund 1-2 PhD students to work on projects separate from this proposal. Commercialising ColourSpecs will help people with ICV in the UK and worldwide by alleviating their day-to-day colour challenges and provide new AT for helping them pursue careers that require accurate colour vision.

In the future, we will extend our visualisation techniques to infrared and ultraviolet, with applications to medicine, crops, and security.

First and foremost, ColourSpecs has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people with ICV in the UK and worldwide. ColourSpecs will increase their independent living and their quality of life, helping them overcome daily challenges such as coordinating clothing and decorations, buying fruit and veg, telling when food has gone 'off', detecting burns and rashes, identifying medication, cooking meat, and accessing information. Improved quality of life has long-term implications for the health and wellbeing of millions of people in the UK, so these are the principal beneficiaries from this research.

Second, providing a functioning AT system for accommodating people with ICV will expand the number of potential recruits for services that have traditionally rejected people with ICV. The army, navy, air force; commercial pilots, train operators, and ship captains; and police and fire services all typically do not accept people with ICV. ColourSpecs will reverse this, increasing recruitment pools and reducing recruitment and advertising costs.

Third, as part of this project we will be developing a colour-to-vision mapping design space in which properties of colour are aligned with other visual properties (e.g, length and orientation of tiled meters, temporal variations in brightness or hue). This can be thought of as re-visualisation, as properties of a physical location in space (in the case of ColourSpecs, this is colour) are mapped to some other visual property and presented using a transparent display as though the remapped properties are on the original physical location. This will have applications in other areas of visualisation, as well as in the burgeoning research and industrial area of augmented reality.

Fourth, the technology behind ColourSpecs (mapping colour properties to other visual properties) can be extended to visualise other invisible properties of the environment such as infrared and ultraviolet radiation. Extending ColourSpecs to provide a means of seeing these other forms of radiation can help medical staff make rapid decisions in triage situations (e.g., quickly detecting hypothermia or fever), crop scientists and farmers to have a greater understanding of the development of their crops (e.g., as they mature, many plants exhibit changes that are only visible using ultraviolet light), and security officers more efficiently assess threats (e.g., using infrared vision to see through shopping bags and ultraviolet vision to check security credentials on documentation). Existing research collaborations between Computing and Life Sciences at the University of Dundee, and NHS Tayside Ninewells Hospital's Department of Ophthalmology provide the ideal framework for exploring these future extensions of the ColourSpecs project.

Fifth, members of the general public who attend our exhibits will learn more about ICV, as well as our ColourSpecs technology as a way to overcome the common challenges caused by ICV. ICV simulations will allow people with typical vision to see the world as someone with ICV, helping illustrate the frustrations associated with ICV, as well as motivating the need for ColourSpecs.

Finally, our pool of ICV participants will benefit from engaging in our entire research process, as well as with the final art exhibit. Both elements will help our participants with ICV reflect on the colour-related challenges they encounter, helping them to reflect on the world around them and critically engage with problems that have simply 'always been there'. The project will also allow our ICV participants to learn about existing and new technologies for helping with ICV-related challenges, as well as ICV simulation techniques to help them illustrate how the world appears to them.