AiRcupid: Supporting Cucumber Picking for Intellectual Disabilities using Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality

As one of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the United Nation (UN), building an inclusive society is essential to fostering peace and harmony. Through social participation, persons with disabilities in particular can gain confidence and a sense of fulfilment. However, people with intellectual disabilities may have difficulty making decisions of their own initiative and may face various difficulties in employment. This paper proposes a new technology to support cucumber harvesting for individuals with intellectual disabilities by combining deep neural network (DNN)based harvest timing determination and augmented reality (AR)based harvest instruction presentation. Through evaluation experiments targeting four participants with different levels of intellectual disabilities in an actual cucumber field, the effectiveness of the proposed system is verified, demonstrating that the proposed technology can significantly improve the work performance of individuals with intellectual disabilities.