Navigation in eight cardinal directions with pseudo-attraction force for the visually impaired

Authors:
Tomohiro Amemiya;Hisashi Sugiyama
Affiliations:
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Kanagawa, Japan;Information for Fire and Disaster Prevention, Kyoto City Fire Department, Kyoto, Japan
Venue:
SMC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE international conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics
Year:
2009

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Abstract

We have proposed a haptic direction indicator that will help visually impaired pedestrians to travel a path and avoid hazards areas intuitively and safely by means of force-based navigation. The haptic direction indicator uses the pseudoattraction force technique, which generates a pulling or pushing force in portable or mobile devices by exploiting the nonlinear relationship between perceived acceleration and physical acceleration. We have investigated the angular resolution of the pseudoattraction force for the visually impaired in a static posture to design a practical haptic direction indicator. This paper describes a prototype of a crosshair haptic direction indicator based on our previous findings. An experiment was performed to clarify the perceptual characteristics when a visually impaired pedestrian is navigated by perceiving force sensation. The results show that most of the visually impaired participants could walk in a predetermined cardinal direction with the haptic direction indicator. Finally, we discuss the drawbacks of our system and design improvements.