A system to aid blind people in the mobility: A usability test and its results

Abstract

Blind people need to become as independent as possible in their daily life in order to guarantee a fully social inclusion. Mobility means the possibility of freely moving, without support of any accompanying person, at home, in public and private buildings, and in open spaces, as the streets of the town. Mobile and wireless technologies, and in particular the ones used to locate persons or objects, can be used to realize navigation systems in an intelligent environment. Such systems open new opportunities to improve the speed, easiness, and safety of the visually impaired persons mobility. Using these technologies together with Text To Speech systems and a mobile-based database the authors developed a cost effective, easy-to-use orientation and navigation system: RadioVirgilio/SesamoNet 1. The cost effectiveness is due to the recovery of RFID identity tags from cattle slaughtering: these tags are then borrowed to create a grid used for navigation. In this paper the results of an usability analysis of this guide system are presented. A preliminary experiment involving a small group of experts and a blind person is described. In order to evaluate the usability, three cognitive walkthrough sessions have been done to discuss the system's basic functionality and to highlight the most critical aspects to be modified. © 2007 IEEE

Virtual Environment System in Support of a Traditional Orientation and Mobility Rehabilitation Program for People Who Are Blind

“…Soundbased VEs have been investigated and developed for blind persons (D'Atri et al, 2007;Gonzalez-Mora, 2003;Kurniawan, Sporka, Nemec, & Slavik, 2004;Sán-chez, Noriega, & Farías, 2008;Seki & Sato, 2011); however, this research showed that successful exploration using only sound requires a very high level of attention. Haptics, which refers to sensing and manipulation through touch, is another modality for interacting with a VE that can provide the user with tactile, kinesthetic, and reaction force information about the environment, as well as a means of controlling events in the VE.…”

Feature Detection Applied to Context-Aware Blind Guidance Support

“…In recent years some research teams [4][5][6] have developed navigation systems based on this technology. In the case of outdoor environments, some hybrid systems have been proposed that use GPS as the main information source and use RFID for correction and minimization of the location error.…”

Low-frequency RFID based mobility network for blind people: System description, evolutions and future developments

“…The Sesamonet system is composed by an electronic path made of low-frequency RFID transponders (1), a custom made electronic stick (2) and a PDA/Smartphone (3) eventually equipped with a Bluetooth earphone (4). Each component is shown in Fig.…”

“…With the aim of giving the possibility of an independent and safe mobility to blind persons, an assistive system based on RFID technology named Sesamonet has been designed, developed and patented at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission [3,4]. Since the first patent registration in 2006 [5] the system has continuously been improved: in the following sections of the article a general overview of the system history, components and functioning is presented.…”