How can we best use landmarks to support older people in navigation?

Abstract

Although landmarks are an integral part of navigation, they have rarely been used explicitly within electronic pedestrian navigation aids. We describe a two-part study into the use of landmarks in such aids, using a set of field experiments. The first part investigated whether such devices can be effective for older adults (over 60 years old), who might particularly benefit from them due to declines in sensory, cognitive and motor abilities. The second part compared the effectiveness of different methods of presenting landmark information. We show that a pedestrian navigation aid based around landmarks is particularly useful for older people and demonstrate that text, speech and photographs are all effective ways of presenting landmark information, although speech on its own has some drawbacks. We found that different people prefer information to be presented in different modalities, indicating a need for personalisation, although multimodality may also help to address this issue.

Interactive cartographic route descriptions

“…The mean of the scores for each individual component was calculated to give a Raw TLX (RTLX) which can be interpreted as a measure of overall workload [20,21]. Similar to Goodman et al [20] we modified the TLX response scale to provide only 6 possible responses.…”

“…Evaluating a navigation aid in the context of a specific user group is a common practice. For example, Fickas et al [17] and Goodman et al [21] evaluated navigation aids in the context of cognitively impaired and elderly groups respectively. In our evaluation, as is commonly done [49], we use sketch maps as a tool to measure one's degree of spatial knowledge regarding an environment.…”

“…The evaluation methodology implemented is based on that of Goodman et al [20,21] and Fickas et al [17]. As discussed in the introduction to this paper the use of route descriptions can occur in many contexts.…”

“…A number of studies have also been performed to determine the most suitable representation for a route description in a given context [21,17,44]. Ishikawa et al [27] showed a map representation to be more effective than a turn-by-turn representation for pedestrian navigation.…”

“…Chittaro and Burigat [9] evaluated the integration of different pairs of representations for mobile tourist guides. Goodman et al [21] found that landmark information is represented equally effectively using a text description, verbal description and photographs in the context of pedestrian navigation. Fickas [17] found a verbal description to outperform three other representations in the context of individuals with cognitive impairments performing pedestrian navigation.…”