My research interests are in blindness, visual impairment and their rehabilitation. I am privileged to have a distinguished multidisciplinary group of colleagues in the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center at Smith-Kettlewell to help address these problems. My own training was in engineering, and our staff incorporates people with backgrounds in ophthalmology, optometry, psychology, audition, engineering, computer vision, and computer programming. Our research goal is to develop and apply new scientific knowledge and practical, cost-effective devices to better understand and address the real-world problems of blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind consumers.problems of blind, visually-impaired, and deaf-blind consumers. To improve our understanding of vision loss, we are undertaking the SKI Study, a longitudinal assessment of visual impairment in an older population and its effects on everyday task performance. Our R&D projects include "Talking Signs" remotely readable signage for blind travelers, improved communication technology for deaf-blind persons, new jobsite instrumentation for blind employees, improved screening technology for older persons with visual impairments, wheelchair mobility for visually impaired persons, access to graphics for blind persons, and collaborative projects on computer vision devices to allow blind persons to read visual displays and to locate and read environmental signs.
We have collaborations with other Smith-Kettlewell investigators, especially infant vision researchers William Good MD and Anthony Norcia PhD who have given generously of their time to help address goals related to visual impairment and rehabilitation. Many projects also make use of outside collaboration. Examples include collaboration on wheelchair mobility for blind persons with researchers from San Francisco State University and the University of Pittsburgh Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center; computer vision projects for blind persons in collaboration with Blindsight Inc and Alan Yuille PhD’s lab at UCLA; and studies of vision impairment in the elderly in collaboration with the Buck Institute.
Primary funding for our Center’s projects comes from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, with other important sources of support including the National Eye Institute and The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute.
Projects:
Recent Publication:
- Visual Acuity in the Oldest Old (PDF) in Research to Prevent Blindness
Contact:
brabyn@ski.org
The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, 2318 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, CA 94115