Movilidad para invidentes utilizando el GPS del teléfono inteligente y un dispositivo táctil vestible

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. 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 people with visually impairments. Moreover, results show the potentials of smartphones and tactile-foot devices in assistive technology.