Abstract
People with visual impairments face considerable limitations with their mobility, but still there is little infrastructure in place to help them. In this study, we present a new wearable navigation system, “Personal Radar”, which assists blind people to navigate in indoor environments using a system composed of ultrasonic sensors and different output modalities. The device is a self-contained, self-governed system that is aimed to design for obstacle detection, current location awareness and direction suggestion for the visually impaired in indoor conditions. The system design primarily consists of ultrasonic sensors, auditory
and tactile actuators, and microcontroller. In addition to distance and time information obtained from the system,
subjective perception and perceived workload are assessed. After briefly describing our initial system design, we report the improvements from the pilot study. Then, we introduce our experiment in
progress. In the experiment, blind folded students and visually impaired people navigate through mazes and an empty
room based on auditory and vibrotactile feedback of the device.
This system is expected to serve as an effective research platform for obstacle detection, current location awareness, and
direction suggestion for the visually impaired.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the Upper Peninsula Interdisciplinary Student Research Conference (UPISRC-2014) |
| Place of Publication | Houghton, Michigan |
| Number of pages | 2 |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2014 |
Fields of science
- 102 Computer Sciences
JKU Focus areas
- Computation in Informatics and Mathematics
- Engineering and Natural Sciences (in general)