Route Guidance for Visually Impaired Based on Haptic Technology and Their Spatial Cognition

Haptic (vibration) information expression is an effective human-computer interaction mode and information transfer method. It makes up shortcomings of sound under certain conditions and is an important channel of information transfer for route guidance field. As a special kind of walkers, the visually impaired pedestrians have a specific type of cognition or perception of route guidance environment (including spatial orientation, distance and walking speed etc.) and they have sharp sense of touch resources form the ordinary. This work integrated application of GPS, GIS and Haptic (vibration) technology to develop more reliable mode route guidance for the visually impaired. It provides different vibration to the user under two circumstances: key nodes of roads ahead and deviation planning path. It resists environmental noise, reflects timely and has high effectiveness. Based on Google Legend phone, we developed the prototype and realized the designed functions, and verified the effectiveness of the system. We initially determined the thresholds of deviating from the path, those at road junctions and other nodes through experiments, interviews etc. And we used the thresholds for experiments testing and guiding. Then they were inspected, corrected and improved in the field practice. Finally, more reasonable thresholds were drawn out for future applications in reality.