Abstract
This paper reports on the progress of a wearable assistive technology (AT) device designed to enhance the independent, safe, and efficient mobility of blind and visually impaired pedestrians in outdoor environments. Such device exploits the smartphone’s positioning and computing capabilities to locate and guide users along urban settings. The necessary navigation instructions to reach a destination are encoded as vibrating patterns which are conveyed to the user via a foot-placed tactile interface. To determine the performance of the proposed AT device, two user experiments were conducted. The first one requested a group of 20 voluntary normally sighted subjects to recognize the feedback provided by the tactile-foot interface. The results showed recognition rates over 93%. The second experiment involved two blind voluntary subjects which were assisted to find target destinations along public urban pathways. Results show that the subjects successfully accomplished the task and suggest that blind and visually impaired pedestrians might find the AT device and its concept approach useful, friendly, fast to master, and easy to use.
Highlights
The above rates refer to the mean scores obtained from the participants, i.e., they represent the central tendency for each navigational instruction
Taskhas consisted of guiding the subjects along a 280 m path from the forecourt a church The to a welluser interface (UI)
Number that is transmitted to the electronic module when approaching sisted guiding subjects along
Summary
This response is proportional to the dimension of the problem: according to the World Health Organization (WHO) 2019 World Report on Vision [1], there are about. 235 million people with severe visual disability (including blindness), for which vision cannot be corrected with ocular surgery or the use of standard glasses. AT for people who are blind or visually impaired can be classified into three major task-specific aids: reading, computer access, and mobility (Table 1). AT for blindness and low vision Reading Braille books Audio books Computer access
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