Robotic Guidance System for Visually Impaired Users Running Outdoors Using Haptic Feedback

For the visually impaired people, some outdoor activities like running or soccer are difficult, due to not being able to clearly see the environment. Recently, multiple researchers have contributed to help the visually impaired people run outdoors using robotic systems with different types of feedback, such as auditory feedback and haptic feedback. They discovered that using robotic systems can be an effective way to guide visually impaired people while exercising outdoors. In this paper, we propose a method to guide the visually impaired people to do sports outside using a robotic system with haptic feedback, and we evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system through experiments with blindfolded users running outdoors. In the running guidance task, the position of the runner is determined from the visual feed of a drone, and haptic feedback produced on the users' left lower leg is used to convey to the runner the directions in which to move to remain on a specific path. Additionally, we compared the performance of users under different haptic feedback modalities in the running task. The three compared modalities are: producing vibration only during the swing phase, only during stance phase or producing vibration continuously. The experimental results for a running task showed that our system enabled users to remain inside a specified track 93% of the total running time, while the ratio decreased to 79%, 77%, and 61% when receiving vibrations during only swing phase, during only stance phase, and without using any feedback respectively. We also observed users felt safer while running blindfolded by using the proposed method.