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Abstract
BackgroundA challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. While people without disabilities often use maps or written directions as navigation tools or for remaining oriented, this cognitively-impaired population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons on maps or signage) and presents the designer with a challenge to tailor navigation information specific to each user and context.MethodsThis paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. A solution is proposed based on passive near-field RFID tags and scanning PDAs. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real subjects. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the RFID tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in RFID tags.ResultsWe found that passive RFIDs generally served as good context for triggering navigation prompts, although individual differences in effectiveness varied. The results of controlled experiments provided more evidence with regard to applicabilities of the proposed autonomous indoor wayfinding method.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the ability to adapt indoor wayfinding devices for appropriate timing of directions and standing orientation will be particularly important.
Highlights
Cognitive impairments range from ones that are present at birth, to ones that are acquired due to some form of traumatic brain injury or illness, to ones that emerge through the normal aging process, to ones that arise due to complicated causes such as schizophrenia
Experimental Results The PDA used in the experiment is an ETEN X800, equipped with a screen size 320*240, Wi-Fi 802.11 g, Bluetooth, GPRS/HSDPA and an ISO 14443A radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader the scanning range of which is about 10 cm
A small user study involving individuals with cognitive impairments investigated its performance in exploratory, control, and comparative experiments with the PDA equipped with autonomous routing capabilities and context sensing
Summary
Cognitive impairments range from ones that are present at birth (such as Down’s syndrome and intellectual and developmental disabilities, IDD), to ones that are acquired due to some form of traumatic brain injury or illness (such as aphasia, a speech and language disorder, or amnesia), to ones that emerge through the normal aging process (such as Alzheimer’s disease), to ones that arise due to complicated causes such as schizophrenia. While people without disabilities often use maps or written directions as navigation tools or for remaining oriented, this cognitively-impaired population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons on maps or signage) and presents the designer with a challenge to tailor navigation information specific to each user and context. Some dementia patients may suffer from spatial disorientation at unfamiliar places or forgetting intended destinations [3]; people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) or intellectual and developmental disabilities may not be able to recall clues of the routes they once firmly trained to acquire [4,5].
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