Impact of a Vibrotactile Belt on Emotionally Challenging Everyday Situations of the Blind

Abstract

Spatial orientation and navigation depend primarily on vision. Blind people lack this critical source of information. To facilitate wayfinding and to increase the feeling of safety for these people, the “feelSpace belt” was developed. The belt signals magnetic north as a fixed reference frame via vibrotactile stimulation. This study investigates the effect of the belt on typical orientation and navigation tasks and evaluates the emotional impact. Eleven blind subjects wore the belt daily for seven weeks. Before, during and after the study period, they filled in questionnaires to document their experiences. A small sub-group of the subjects took part in behavioural experiments before and after four weeks of training, i.e., a straight-line walking task to evaluate the belt’s effect on keeping a straight heading, an angular rotation task to examine effects on egocentric orientation, and a triangle completion navigation task to test the ability to take shortcuts. The belt reduced subjective discomfort and increased confidence during navigation. Additionally, the participants felt safer wearing the belt in various outdoor situations. Furthermore, the behavioural tasks point towards an intuitive comprehension of the belt. Altogether, the blind participants benefited from the vibrotactile belt as an assistive technology in challenging everyday situations.

Improved Spatial Knowledge Acquisition through Sensory Augmentation

“…Similar techniques could be applied to sensory substitution, for instance, to compensate for sensory disability, disorder, or deficits [40,[118][119][120][121][122][123][124], or to other sensory augmentation devices to further enhance human perception by allowing humans to perceive information that they cannot naturally incorporate through their senses [27,[30][31][32][33][34][35]. Specifically, similar sensory augmentation techniques have been used to aid deaf and blind people during spatial navigation, showing that training with sensory augmentation devices can lead to improved navigational performance and reduced discomfort [46,121,125,126].…”

“…A potential explanation is that the complex homing paradigm was conducted on a very small scale (19-22 m) [43] and could therefore have been solved by exclusively using the vestibular system [44,45]. Moreover, these studies were challenged with small sample sizes, for instance, due to time-intensive experimental procedures [41,43] or a focus on specific test subjects [40,46]. Interestingly, previous research investigating spatial knowledge in real-world environments identified the challenge that there is a large interindividual variability in spatial navigation ability and the acquisition of spatial knowledge across the population [47][48][49], which increases even more when factors such as the degree of familiarity with the environment are likely to impact the results.…”

Wearable systems without experiential disruptions: exploring the impact of device feedback changes on explicit awareness, physiological synchrony, sense of agency, and device-body ownership

“…However, despite rapid advancements, a significant barrier to long-term adoption exists: a large percentage of users discontinue the use of these wearables over time. For instance, as many as 40% of individuals fitted with a prosthesis either rarely use it or abandon it altogether (Biddiss and Chau, 2007;Brandebusemeyer et al, 2021). Preliminary evidence suggests that one key reason for this attrition is the increased cognitive load and explicit device awareness imposed by these devices (Slater et al, 2003;Murray, 2004;Li et al, 2019;Danry et al, 2022) such as increased attention, concentrates or focalization of the devices in our immediate experience (see Figure 1).…”

Improved spatial knowledge acquisition through sensory augmentation

“…A potential explanation is that the complex homing paradigm was conducted on a very small scale (19–22 meters; 44) and could therefore have been solved by exclusively using the vestibular system (45, 46). Moreover, these studies were challenged with small sample sizes, for instance, due to time-intensive experimental procedures (42, 44) or a focus on specific test subjects (i.e., 41,47). Interestingly, previous research investigating spatial knowledge in real-world environments identified the challenge that there is a large interindividual variability in spatial navigation ability and the acquisition of spatial knowledge across the population (48–50) which is increased even more when factors such as the degree of familiarity with the environment are likely to impact the results.…”