Ottobock creates image dataset of people with limb loss

AUSTIN, Texas – Ottobock has announced the public release of the #DearAI Community Library, two open-source datasets of images depicting people with limb loss in everyday life created, selected, and annotated by the community itself, powered by Microsoft. The library is now freely available at https://huggingface.co/ottobock and represents a significant step forward in addressing one of AI's most persistent blind spots: the near-total absence of people with disabilities, and people with limb loss and limb difference in particular, from AI-generated imagery, the company says. "AI can only imagine what it has already seen and it has never truly seen the real lives of people with limb loss or limb differences," said Martin Böhm, CEO at Ottobock. " With the #DearAI Community Library, we are changing that. This initiative is about contribution: giving AI something real to learn from, built by the people whose lives it has never accurately reflected. The community shaped every decision, and that is what makes this library different." An international group of Ottobock prosthetic users – with upper and lower limb differences – worked within Microsoft's Community Library Creator to define “preferred representation.” Drawing on Ottobock's own image libraries, as well as user submissions from across the globe, ambassadors selected and annotated images and videos against community-defined standards for AI imagery. The result is two datasets of AI-interpretable images, one focused on upper limb loss and difference (Limb Difference & Prosthetic Representation Dataset – Upper Limb (LDPR–UL), one on lower limb loss and difference (Limb Difference & Prosthetic Representation Dataset – Lower Limb (LDPR–LL). The library is published on Hugging Face and is freely accessible to anyone working with AI – from researchers and developers, to brands and creative agencies and individual creators.

Photo courtesy of Ottobock.