Blind Navigation and the Role of Technology

Abstract

The ability to navigate from place to place is an integral part of daily life. Most people would acknowledge that vision plays a critical role, but would have great difficulty in identifying the visual information they use, or when they use it. Although it is easy to imagine getting around without vision in well-known environments, such as walking from the bedroom to the bathroom in the middle of the night, few people have experienced navigating large-scale, unfamiliar environments nonvisually. Imagine, for example, being blindfolded and finding your train in New York's Grand Central Station. Yet, blind people travel independently on a daily basis. To facilitate safe and efficient navigation, blind individuals must acquire travel skills and use sources of nonvisual environmental information that are rarely considered by their sighted peers. How do you avoid running into the low-hanging branch over the sidewalk, or falling into the open manhole? When you are walking down the street, how do you know when you have reached the post office, the bakery, or your friend's house?The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the navigational technologies available to blind individuals to support independent travel. Our focus here is on blind navigation in large-scale, unfamiliar environments, but the technology discussed can also be used in well-known spaces and may be useful to those with low vision.

Robust and Effective Component-Based Banknote Recognition for the Blind

“…In the last 50 years there have been many efforts to develop electronic aids to improve quality of life and the safety of individuals with special needs [4, 6, 21, 22, 29, 30, 34-36, 38, 39, 45-47]. Several techniques have been developed to identify banknotes from camera captured images for helping blind or visually impaired people.…”

Wayfinding and Navigation for People with Disabilities Using Social Navigation Networks

“…Another example is the Digital Signage System (DSS) [23] which employs a hand-held device equipped with an infra-red emitter that the user pans until a reflection is received from one of many retro-reflective barcodes strategically placed in the indoor environment. The barcode is read by the DSS using this reflection and this information is fed to the building database (called the Building Navigator) which then returns to the user information about the content of the surroundings and routing to the destination using a synthetic voice as audio feedback.…”

Design and Analysis of a Portable Indoor Localization Aid for the Visually Impaired

“…1). In addition, incorporating the cane as part of the navigation aid is of critical importance since it allows the visually impaired user to physically touch the environment with a tool that they already know and trust (Giudice and Legge 2008). Considering our proposed sensor placement and the requirement that the system must be portable, one can appreciate the stark difference between indoor human localization and mobile (wheeled) robot localization.…”