Analysis of Navigation Assistants for Blind and Visually Impaired People: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the development in the field of navigation and routing devices has become a hindering task for the researchers to develop smart and intelligent guiding mechanism at indoor and outdoor locations for blind and visually impaired people (BVIPs). The existing research need to be analysed from a historical perception including early research on the first electronic travel aids to the use of modern artificial vision models for the navigation of BVIPs. Diverse approaches such as: e-cane or guide dog, infrared-based cane, laser based walker and many others are proposed for the navigation of BVIPs. But most of these techniques have limitations such as: infrared and ultrasonic based assistance has short range capacities for object detection. While laser based assistance can harm other people if it directly hit them on their eyes or any other part of the body. These trade-offs are critical to bring this technology in practice.To systematically assess, analyze, and identify the primary studies in this specialized field and provide an overview of the trends and empirical evidence in the proposed field. This systematic research work is performed by defining a set of relevant keywords, formulating four research questions, defining selection criteria for the articles, and synthesizing the empirical evidence in this area. Our pool of studies include 191 most relevant articles to the proposed field reported between 2011 and 2020 (a portion of 2020 is included). This systematic mapping will help the researchers, engineers, and practitioners to make more authentic decisions for finding gaps in the available navigation assistants and suggest a new and enhanced smart assistant application accordingly to ensure safety and accurate guidance of the BVIPs. This research work have several implications in particular the impact of reducing fatalities and major injuries of BVIPs. INDEX TERMS Blind and visually impaired people, healthcare, smart devices, systematic literature review.

Accessible wayfinding and navigation: a systematic mapping study

“…A systematic review of outdoor pedestrian navigation systems for visually impaired people reported in literature from 2015 to 2020 is presented in [49]; even though the system analysis is very accurate leading to an interesting hierarchical taxonomy, the scope of this review is limited to one type of users moving in urban environments only. A systematic review of solutions for blind and visuallyimpaired people is presented in [87]: 191 most relevant articles published between 2011 and 2020 have been selected from different digital libraries and analyzed according to different dimensions, such as approaches and technologies proposed for navigation, hardware components used for obstacle avoidance, and adopted performance metrics. This is the most recent and extended review available in literature, but it pays attention only to visual disabilities.…”

An IoT Machine Learning-Based Mobile Sensors Unit for Visually Impaired People

“…Different types of walking assistants are being used by visually impaired individuals to enable them to move around and perform their day-to-day activities. A recent systematic review was performed to analyze the navigation assistant systems used for blind and visually impaired people [ 7 ]. In this review, studies proposing navigation assistants were classified according to the different design approaches used, technology/tools adopted to implement these systems, the mechanisms/applications followed and the parameters considered to ensure the applicability and the reliability of these systems.…”

A Survey on Recent Advances in AI and Vision-Based Methods for Helping and Guiding Visually Impaired People

“…Some of those articles were read when preparing this paper, to understand the different ways this subject has been addressed in the past. In their articles, Bhowmick and Hazarika [4] and Khan et al [5] provided detailed descriptions of their research methodologies, highlighting the connections between the different fields pertaining to assistive technologies for BVIP. They spotted the most frequent keywords found in the papers they analyzed and their common sources, and stressed the trends of research.…”