Accessible smartphones for blind users: A case study for a wayfinding system (original) (raw)
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Blind's Mate - A Navigation System for Blind People
International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology, 2019
Visually challenged people rely on companions around them on daily basis. Basic chores of day to day life pose a challenge for people with impaired vision. Walking on streets while dodging obstacles and navigating through roads to reach desired destination independently is one such challenge. Proposed system 'Blind's Mate' is a combination of software and hardware technology that can be used to improve the walking experience of blind people. Blind’s Mate is a combination of smart stick and a mobile app that can alert people of impending obstacles and water pits while providing audio feed to the users about obstacles encountered during walking. This stick is embedded with ultrasonic sensor to detect any obstacles in front of the user. The app gives live feed to the user continuously via earphones. Speech warning messages are activated when any obstacle is detected. The proposed stick is of low cost, has fast response, low power consumption, light weight and an effective means to help blind people finding their way on streets with ease.
Towards a navigation system for blind people
ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, 2012
In this paper, we present an initial study towards of an indoor navigation system for blind people. As the system itself is still in an early stage of development, we conducted a Wizard of Oz study using a generic Wizard of Oz system designed for mobile and ubiquitous studies. The goal of the study was to validate a set of audio-based navigation commands in a field study context. Further, we wanted to identify usability issues of the Wizard of Oz tool, and ensure the appropriateness of the addressed study setup. Therefore, we used eight human wizards as participants in the study. Their task was to guide two blindfolded actors through a predefined route. Such settings helped us to achieve high ecological validity of the results compared to laboratory testing. We found that the developed study setup is fully mobile and can be used in any mobile context, the voice commands chosen for navigation are almost complete, and can be used with slight modifications for the follow-up study. Additionally we identified several usability flaws of the Wizard of Oz tool. After implementing the findings, the tool and the study setup are ready for a follow-up study with blind persons in order to validate the selected voice commands in depth.
Prototype of Mobile Device to Contribute to Urban Mobility of Visually Impaired People
Big Data and Cognitive Computing
Visually impaired people (VIP) feel a lack of aid for their facilitated urban mobility, mainly due to obstacles encountered on their routes. This paper describes the design of AudioMaps, a prototype of cartographic technology for mobile devices. AudioMaps was designed to register the descriptions and locations of points of interest. When a point is registered, the prototype inserts a georeferenced landmark on the screen (based on Google Maps). Then, if the AudioMaps position is next to (15 or 5 m from) the previously registered point, it sends by audio the missing distance and a description. For a preview, a test area located in Monte Carmelo, Brazil, was selected, and the light poles, street corners (name of streets forming the intersections), and crosswalks were registered in AudioMaps. A tactile model, produced manually, was used to form the first image of four sighted people and four VIP, who completed a navigation task in the tested area. The results indicate that both the tact...
2011
According to the Braille Institute of America [1], there are 15 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States. They have different important daily needs including navigation. Visually impaired people rely on different tools and skills to navigate. They usually rely on their white canes, seeing-eye-dogs and other skills acquired over time to aid their navigation. Many technologies have been developed to assist blind users with different navigation needs. These include obstacle avoidance technologies as well as routing technologies. Any routing technology for blind requires different components including localization, map representation, path planning, interface, and a component to translate the planner output into meaningful instructions. The focus of this work is on developing the interface and the translator component of a full smart phone-based navigation system, called NavPal. The application improves on previous work by giving better quality instructions, and giving more flexibility to the user in choosing the level of verbosity and using different input/output modalities. The application tries to keep a good balance between the quality of the navigation instructions and the automatic production of these instructions. The interface was tested with eight blind users who traversed three routes, each. The results indicated that 75% of the twenty four navigation tasks were accomplished successfully, while relying only on the interface instructions. The users provided feedback on all components of the interface and provided suggestions for improvement, which will be considered in future work.
Assistance and Navigation Application for visually impaired people using Android
2021
Blind people are liable to get in contact with whatever obstacle which pass before them during walking, subjecting them to risk of injury caused from fall and it could also cause great damage to them. The aim of this project is to develop a smart system with distance measurement system. The system is made up of an ultrasonic sensor as input and earphone as the output. Ultrasonic sensor is used to measure distance from the obstacle. Data is then sent to National Instrument myRIO1900 controller for processing which later produce beeping sound as the output. The process was graphically programmed using LabVIEW with FPGA as the intended target. Performance of the system has been ascertained through several verification tests. In general, the device will alert blind people of the obstacles through the audio output through which they can walk safely without any problem.
International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, 2009
We describe a wayfinding system for blind and visually impaired persons that uses a camera phone to determine the user's location with respect to color markers, posted at locations of interest (such as offices), which are automatically detected by the phone. The color marker signs are specially designed to be detected in real time in cluttered environments using computer vision software running on the phone; a novel segmentation algorithm quickly locates the borders of the color marker in each image, which allows the system to calculate how far the marker is from the phone. We present a model of how the user's scanning strategy (i.e. how he/she pans the phone left and right to find color markers) affects the system's ability to detect color markers given the limitations imposed by motion blur, which is always a possibility whenever a camera is in motion. Finally, we describe experiments with our system tested by blind and visually impaired volunteers, demonstrating their...
BlindeDroid: An Information Tracking System for Real-time Guiding of Blind People
Procedia Computer Science, 2015
Among the activities affected by visual impairment, navigation plays a fundamental role, since it enables the person to independently move in safety. The heterogeneous environment, easily perceived by visually enabled people, is hardly known by partially sighted people. A challenging task for these people is independent navigation in new spaces/buildings/environments. The environment is usually signaled and labeled with visual marks and signs which are not appropriate for blind persons. With the purpose of balancing the access to services and spaces among all persons, this work proposes an innovative navigation and information system to help the navigation of blind people within new environments (e.g. shopping center, public office building). Based on smartphones and wireless sensors deployed in the environment, we propose an information tracking system for realtime guide blind people (BlindeDroid). It offers guided navigation, answering questions, and providing objective information about places, products and services that are available surrounding the user.
Assistive Technology, 2020
This paper describes the interface and testing of an indoor navigation app-ASSIST that guides blind & visually impaired (BVI) individuals through an indoor environment with high accuracy while augmenting their understanding of the surrounding environment. ASSIST features personalized interfaces by considering the unique experiences that BVI individuals have in indoor wayfinding and offers multiple levels of multimodal feedback. After an overview of the technical approach and implementation of the first
Information and Assisted Navigation System for Blind People
Nowadays public buildings are changing constantly, often people have to take different routes to reach known destinations. At the same time, new services and places are made available to attract more people to the shopping center. This dynamic environment is usually signalled and labelled with visual marks and signs which are not appropriated for blind persons. Therefore, blind users are unintentionally deprived of a full participation in the society. With the purpose of equalize the access to services and spaces among all persons, this work proposes an innovative indoor navigation and information system for public buildings, namely shopping centers, based on existing technologies not used for this purpose. Intending to allow a comfortable and helpful aid on blind persons trips to the shopping center, this proposal system relies on users smartphone and wireless sensors deployed in the environment.
A Pocket-PC Based Navigational Aid for Blind Individuals
– This paper describes a Pocket-PC based Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) that helps a blind individual navigate through indoor environments. The system detects surrounding obstacles using ultrasonic range sensors and the travel direction using an electronic compass. The acquired information is processed by a Pocket-PC to generate a virtual acoustic environment where nearby obstacles are recognizable to the user. This virtual environment is played back through stereo headphones, so that the user can perceive surrounding obstacles and the direction of the Earth's magnetic North, using spatialized 3D sounds. The paper describes the instrumental and computational aspects of the design and presents the results, demonstrating the improvement in blind travel achieved with the system.