IEEE Trans Haptics. 2021 Jan-Mar;14(1):109-122. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2020.2996748. Epub 2021 Mar 24.
Recently, in the attempt to increase blind people autonomy and improve their quality of life, a lot of effort has been devoted to develop technological travel aids. These systems can surrogate spatial information about the environment and deliver it to end-users through sensory substitution (auditory, haptic). However, despite the promising research outcomes, these solutions have met scarce acceptance in real-world. Often, this is also due to the limited involvement of real end users in the conceptual and design phases. In this article, we propose a novel indoor navigation system based on wearable haptic technologies. All the developmental phases were driven by continuous feedback from visually impaired persons. The proposed travel aid system consists of a RGB-D camera, a processing unit to compute visual information for obstacle avoidance, and a wearable device, which can provide normal and tangential force cues for guidance in an unknown indoor environment. Experiments with blindfolded subjects and visually impaired participants show that our system could be an effective support during indoor navigation, and a viable tool for training blind people to the usage of travel aids.
最近，为了提高盲人的自主性和生活质量，人们投入了大量精力来开发技术旅行辅助工具。这些系统可以替代环境的空间信息，并通过感官替代（听觉、触觉）将其传递给最终用户。然而，尽管研究成果很有前景，但这些解决方案在现实世界中的接受程度却很低。通常，这也是由于实际最终用户在概念和设计阶段的参与度有限。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于可穿戴触觉技术的新型室内导航系统。所有的开发阶段都得益于视障人士的持续反馈。该旅行辅助系统由一个 RGB-D 摄像头、一个用于计算障碍物回避视觉信息的处理单元以及一个可穿戴设备组成，该设备可以在未知的室内环境中提供正常和切向力提示，以进行导航。对蒙住眼睛的受试者和视障参与者的实验表明，我们的系统可以在室内导航中提供有效的支持，并且是训练盲人使用旅行辅助工具的可行工具。
