Autonomous indoor wayfinding for individuals with cognitive impairments

Abstract

BackgroundA challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. While people without disabilities often use maps or written directions as navigation tools or for remaining oriented, this cognitively-impaired population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons on maps or signage) and presents the designer with a challenge to tailor navigation information specific to each user and context.MethodsThis paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. A solution is proposed based on passive near-field RFID tags and scanning PDAs. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real subjects. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the RFID tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in RFID tags.ResultsWe found that passive RFIDs generally served as good context for triggering navigation prompts, although individual differences in effectiveness varied. The results of controlled experiments provided more evidence with regard to applicabilities of the proposed autonomous indoor wayfinding method.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that the ability to adapt indoor wayfinding devices for appropriate timing of directions and standing orientation will be particularly important.

Driving, brain injury and assistive technology

“…Difficulty in navigational skills or route planning can be compensated easily by the use of global positioning system (GPS) receivers. The use of navigational systems has been debated to compensate for strategic behavioral deficits in persons with cognitive impairments [5,21]. Although route planning devices provide compensation for a lack of way-finding skills, these systems have the potential to be a distraction to the driver.…”

Use of assistive technology in cognitive rehabilitation: Exploratory studies of the opinions and expectations of healthcare professionals and potential users

“…Another application for AT is assisting users in route finding, which has been described in several patient groups, such as TBI [19], ABI [20] and cognitive deficits due to intellectual disability, dementia and schizophrenia [21].…”

A Brief Review on Multimedia-Based Health Education Applications: Current Trend and Future Potential

“…Studies on asthma and diabetes patients have been identified through three articles each [17,18,22,23,26,33]. Another two studies focused on chronic diseases in general, while one study each was on cardiovascular disease, scoliosis and cognitive impairment [16,27,33,29,34]. There was also a report on care giving problem and depression [25,35].…”

“…Table 1, the ethnicities in each country were represented mainly by their largest group of population i.e. USA dominated by the Whites while Taiwan have mostly Chinese respondents [20,29]. Additionally, the educational level of respondents in half of the articles was not reported.…”

“…It is therefore common for them to willingly follow the constantlyevolving technologies and make adjustments in their lives in order to capture optimal benefits from these changes. For example, the 'autonomous indoor wayfinding concept' can stimulate their interest in learning to cope with their cognitive impairment [29].…”