Rehabilitation program integrating virtual environment to improve orientation and mobility skills for people who are blind

Abstract

This paper presents the integration of a virtual environment (BlindAid) in an orientation and mobility rehabilitation program as a training aid for people who are blind. BlindAid allows the users to interact with different virtual structures and objects through auditory and haptic feedback. This research explores if and how use of the BlindAid in conjunction with a rehabilitation program can help people who are blind train themselves in familiar and unfamiliar spaces. The study, focused on nine participants who were congenitally, adventitiously, and newly blind, during their orientation and mobility rehabilitation program at the Carroll Center for the Blind (Newton, Massachusetts, USA). The research was implemented using virtual environment (VE) exploration tasks and orientation tasks in virtual environments and real spaces. The methodology encompassed both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews, a questionnaire, videotape recording, and user computer logs. The results demonstrated that the BlindAid training gave participants additional time to explore the virtual environment systematically. Secondly, it helped elucidate several issues concerning the potential strengths of the BlindAid system as a training aid for orientation and mobility for both adults and teenagers who are congenitally, adventitiously, and newly blind.

Virtual environment navigation with look-around mode to explore new real spaces by people who are blind

“…Other research on this topic [12] supports this finding, where participants used four times longer to explore the VE compared with the same RS. Nevertheless, the experimental participants used more pauses during the exploration When the experimental participants chose the walk mode, object-to-object was the main spatial strategy and perimeter was secondary, while the findings for the control group and findings of other research show that participants walked mostly using the perimeter strategy and walking was the main tool of exploration [12,15,24].…”

“…Most of the O&M VEs that have been developed for people who are blind replicate this behavior [12,15].…”

“…It enables an individual to navigate within a VE without the physical limitations imposed by tracking devices and via a mechanism closer to the RS method of walking compared with the previous generation of the virtual cane. The second is a technologically augmented assistive cane [15], which equips a cane with capability to act as an input and output peripheral for contemporary mobile technologies. This capability not only allows the operator to navigate with a cane within a VE, but also affords assisted and augmented real world navigation.…”

Propuesta de una interfaz cognitiva para la exploración distante de entornos virtuales como ayuda a las personas ciegas durante la creación de mapas cognitivos

“…The primary orientation and mobility (O&M) aids for blind people in real spaces are the long cane and the dog guide (Balan, Moldoveanu, & Moldoveanu, 2015a;Brock & Kristensson, 2013;Kirner, Gonçalves Kirner, Wataya, & Valente, 2012;Lahav, Schloerb, & Srinivasan, 2015). In the absence of any additional aid, blind people need to physically explore the environment by means of locomotion in order to acquire spatial knowledge at either scale of space (i.e., vista space and navigation space) (Picinali, Afonso, Denis, & Katz, 2014).…”

“…In the absence of any additional aid, blind people need to physically explore the environment by means of locomotion in order to acquire spatial knowledge at either scale of space (i.e., vista space and navigation space) (Picinali, Afonso, Denis, & Katz, 2014). Lahav, Schloerb, & Srinivasan (2015) divide O&M aids into two groups, namely, insitu aids and preplanning aids. They base this classification on the ability of a given aid to help blind people to build a cognitive map before arriving at a given environment.…”