Authors:
Thomas Conway, Dan Kelaher, Wendy Darby, Kristine Harris, Madison Roy, Amy Gray, Stuart Maynard, Marcus McDowell
Abstract:
This disclosure proposes a new type of smart glasses utilizing multiple sensory inputs that can be utilized to assist in various shopping tasks that can benefit visually impaired shoppers and sighted shoppers as well.
Background:
Shopping in stores poses a number of challenges for visually-impaired individuals. There is a lack of assistive technology for visually-impaired individuals specific to shopping in a brick and mortar store. Store navigation, product identification, checkout, are all tasks that are more difficult for VI shoppers. Smart glasses have been used to assist VI individuals however their benefits are limited to this point. There is an opportunity in the industry to harness the advantages of smart glasses for VI shoppers.
Description:
We propose a pair of smart glasses with functionality beneficial to VI shoppers to improve their shopping experience. The glasses would interact with store apps and 3rd party shopping apps on the shopper’s phone. The system could help identify items that are needed in the individual’s pantry, refrigerator, and freezer. The individual can approach the pantry/freezer/fridge and ask the glasses to identify needed foods for the next shopping trip. The needed items could be automatically added to the individual's shopping list in the store or 3rd party shopping app on their phone. The glasses could guide the shopper in-store with navigation aids (separate disclosure). While a shopper is in the store in the aisles, the shopper can query the glasses about specific products to help find the exact product on the shopper’s list. Features in the glasses such as haptics or sounds that can ramp up or down can help the shopper lock into the exact product on the shopping list. Finally the glasses can assist the shopper by identifying the specific type of open lane indicator (Green TAL, White TAFL, lane light, etc) that the specific store uses to identify an open lane and help guide the shopper to that lane.
Related Art:
- Dynamic content rendering based on context for AR and assistant systems - https://patents.google.com/patent/US11966701B2/en (Meta)
"when a user arrives at the grocery store, a reminder may appear displaying the user's shopping list. Using different types of sensor signals to determine the context may be an effective solution for addressing the technical challenge of accurately determining the context for adaptive rendering as these sensor signals may provide comprehensive information about a user's environment and state change for accurate context determination."
- Wearable display system for portable computing devices - https://patents.google.com/patent/US11527220B1/en
"By offering such a convenient visual expansion to the smartwatch display, the smartwatch and other smaller computing devices can be enjoyed by a broader spectrum of consumers, including those who have visual impairments or who otherwise avoid the use of computing devices with small screens due to the type of content they typically access. In addition, users uncomfortable with providing inputs to the smaller device screen can benefit from the opportunity to interact with the smartwatch content through larger hand gestures that permit greater range of motion. This can help reduce or eliminate barriers to digital content access."
- Smart glasses and smart watches for real time connectivity and health - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9870716B1/en
- System and method for analyzing items using image recognition, optical character recognition, voice recognition, manual entry, and bar code scanning technology - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10856807B2/en (shopping lists)
"Also, people who are blind, visually impaired, or illiterate cannot read labels on food and other items to interpret how these items will affect their health and what the serving size is. They need this information or data returned to them audibly."
Character personal shopper system - https://patents.google.com/patent/US9996874B2/en
TGCS Reference 00875
