ICTs for Orientation and Mobility for Blind People

Abstract

Orientation and mobility are two fields of applications of the so-called Assistive Products, in which we can find a high growth in the last ten years. In this group, the so-called Electronic Travel Aids have a capital importance. These applications are focused on helping blind people in the following aspects of their daily lives, among others: avoiding crashing against obstacles, guiding through unknown environments, giving relevant information of the environment, helping blind people “see” by touch devices, electrodes, sounds, etc. Commercial, but also experimental technology has been intensely applied in this field to provide assistive products, which helps in ways that were unexpected some years ago. The authors provide an introduction to this field and a taxonomy of the available assistive products for the orientation and mobility. Finally, they detail advantages and disadvantages of several paradigmatic proposals to provide a global point of view of the state of the art in orientation and mobility technology for this group of users.