MOBILITY OF BLIND PEOPLE USING THE SMARTPHONE’S GPS AND A WEARABLE TACTILE DISPLAY

Abstract

This paper presents a novel wearable system devoted to assist the mobility of blind and visually impaired people in urban environments with the simple use of a smartphone and tactile feedback. The system exploits the positioning data provided by the smartphone’s GPS sensor to locate in real-time the user in the environment and to determine the directions to a destination. The resulting navigational directions are encoded as vibrations and conveyed to the user via an on-shoe tactile display. To validate the pertinence of the proposed system, two experiments were conducted with test users. The first one involved a group of 20 voluntary normally sighted subjects that were requested to recognize the navigational instructions displayed by the tactile-foot device. The results show high recognition rates for the task. The second experiment consisted of guiding two blind voluntary subjects along public urban spaces to target destinations. Results show that the task was successfully accomplished and suggest that the system enhances independent safe navigation of visually impaired and blind people. Moreover, results show the potentials of smartphones and tactile-foot devices in assistive technology. Keywords: assistive technology, GPS localization, mobility of blind people, tactile-foot stimulation, vibrotactile display, wearable system.