Are electronic white canes better than traditional canes? A comparative study with blind and blindfolded participants

Abstract

Visually impaired individuals often rely on assistive technologies such as white canes for independent navigation. Many electronic enhancements to the traditional white cane have been proposed. However, only a few of these proof-of-concept technologies have been tested with authentic users, as most studies rely on blindfolded non-visually impaired participants or no testing with participants at all. Experiments involving blind users are usually not contrasted with the traditional white cane. This study set out to compare an ultrasound-based electronic cane with a traditional white cane. Moreover, we also compared the performance of a group of visually impaired participants (N = 10) with a group of blindfolded participants without visual impairments (N = 31). The results show that walking speed with the electronic cane is significantly slower compared to the traditional white cane. Moreover, the results show that the performance of the participants without visual impairments is significantly slower than for the visually impaired participants. No significant differences in obstacle detection rates were observed across participant groups and device types for obstacles on the ground, while 79% of the hanging obstacles were detected by the electronic cane. The results of this study thus suggest that electronic canes present only one advantage over the traditional cane, namely in its ability to detect hanging obstacles, at least without prolonged practice. Next, blindfolded participants are insufficient substitutes for blind participants who are expert cane users. The implication of this study is that research into digital white cane enhancements should include blind participants. These participants should be followed over time in longitudinal experiments to document if practice will lead to improvements that surpass the performance achieved with traditional canes.

A glimpse into smartphone screen reader use among blind teenagers in rural Nepal

“…The literature on assistive technologies for low vision and blind users is large. It spans from the early work on web accessibility [23], to more recent work on readability for screen readers [24], electronic white canes [25] and emerging systems that help in identifying people through face recognition [26]. To enable individuals through education, a substantial effort has been invested in assistive technologies for blind in the context of learning, especially targeting children [27].…”

Aesthetics and the perceived stigma of assistive technology for visual impairment

“…Recently, white cane enhancements such as environmental scanning and tactile and audio feedback have been the focus of several studies [27][28][29][30]. Though, other potential topics suggested by the participants such as face recognition [31], body language feedback, or reading improvements cannot easily be achieved with white canes.…”

A bibliometric study of human–computer interaction research activity in the Nordic-Baltic Eight countries

“…Bibliometric research methods can be useful in understanding research effort, behavior, structures, growth, and impact; these have also been popular in the fields of human factors (Lee et al, 2005) and HCI (Bartneck & Hu, 2009;Kaye, 2009;Koumaditis & Hussain, 2017). Subfields of HCI have also been studied using bibliometric methods, for example user centered design (Cho et al, 2020), ubiquitous computing (Silva et al 2012), world wide web (Agarwal et al, 2016), human-robot interaction Mubin, Tejlavwala, et al, 2018), accessibility (Sandnes, 2021), mobile technology (Palomäki et al, 2014), intelligent user interfaces (Völkel et al, 2020), human-agent interaction (Mubin et al, 2017), and computer-supported cooperative work (Jacovi et al, 2006;Correia et al, 2013;Keegan et al 2013;Correia et al, 2018aCorreia et al, , 2018bCorreia et al, , 2019. Several bibliometric studies of conferences conclude with informed advice to the conference organizers (Kostakos, 2015;Mubin et al 2017) on how improvements can be made.…”