Design and Evaluation of Vibrating Footwear for Navigation Assistance to Visually Impaired People

A wearable system is designed to provide directional information to visually impaired people. It consists of a mobile phone and haptic shoes. The former serves as the perceptual and control unit that generates directional instructions. Upon receiving the instructions, the shoes combine them with the user's walking status to produce unique vibration patterns. To enable effective direction sensing, a few alternative configurations are proposed, whereby the position and strength of vibrations are modulated programmatically. The prototype system is evaluated in a usability test with 60 subjects. By comparing different configurations, it is shown that the system achieves varying levels of perception accuracy under various walking conditions, and that the proposed design is advantageous to the benchmarking configuration. The system has great potential to provide smart and sensible navigation guidance to visually impaired people especially when integrated with visual processing units.