Two-Tactor Vibrotactile Navigation Information for the Blind: Directional Resolution and Intuitive Interpretation

Abstract

Lacking vision, blind people have to exploit other senses for navigation. Using the tactile rather than the auditory sense avoids masking important environmental information. Directional information is particularly important and traditionally conveyed through an array of tactors, each coding one direction. Here, we present a different approach to represent arbitrary directions with only two tactors. We tested intuitiveness, plasticity, and variability of direction perception in a behavioral experiment in 33 seeing participants.

Comparison of the Static and Dynamic Vibrotactile Interactive Perception of Walking Navigation Assistants for Limited Vision People

“…Merz et al [25] proved that implied motion sequence has a significant forward shift effect on the perceived location of tactile stimuli. Kessler et al [6] studied the number of tactors in the direction encoding of the vibrotactile navigation system (usually in the range of 4 to 12). Their experiment used only two tactors to convey the direction information, and the results proved the feasibility.…”

“…In a noisy environment, the blind people's response to tactile perception is less error-prone than that to the auditory perception. This is because it does not interfere with the user's ability to perceive other environmental events, does not obscure important sound cues in complex environments, and remains easily recognizable under additional cognitive load [6][7][8]. Tactile perception is the most effective way to receive information besides auditory [9].…”

An Indoor and Outdoor Navigation System for Visually Impaired People

“…Moreover, the cosmetic aspect is important to be included as part of the design, because the acceptance from the blind community is crucial. Some approaches have adopted the sensory substitution method, such as the one based on LIDARs [16], or in [17] where vibro-tactile stimulation is applied to the hand palms to code and give directions through a temporal sequence of the stimuli. To achieve safe navigation a vibrating belt together with time-of-flight distance sensors [18] or cameras [19] have been used.…”

A vibrotactile belt to display precise directional information for visually impaired

“…The factors that influence the precision of vibrotactile cueing direction include the arrangement and number of tactors set around the torso [13], and coding algorithm of displaying directional information [14]. In most vibrotactile displays, tactors were located around the torso with same degrees between each adjacent pair [7,10].…”