Haptic Feedback to Assist Blind People in Indoor Environment Using Vibration Patterns

Abstract

Feedback is one of the significant factors for the mental mapping of an environment. It is the communication of spatial information to blind people to perceive the surroundings. The assistive smartphone technologies deliver feedback for different activities using several feedback mediums, including voice, sonification and vibration. Researchers 0have proposed various solutions for conveying feedback messages to blind people using these mediums. Voice and sonification feedback are effective solutions to convey information. However, these solutions are not applicable in a noisy environment and may occupy the most important auditory sense. The privacy of a blind user can also be compromised with speech feedback. The vibration feedback could effectively be used as an alternative approach to these mediums. This paper proposes a real-time feedback system specifically designed for blind people to convey information to them based on vibration patterns. The proposed solution has been evaluated through an empirical study by collecting data from 24 blind people through a mixed-mode survey using a questionnaire. Results show the average recognition accuracy for 10 different vibration patterns are 90%, 82%, 75%, 87%, 65%, and 70%.