Route Guidance For Blind Based On Haptic Technology And Their Spatial Cognition

For ordinary people, the visual sense is the most effective way to obtainenvironmental information, including landmarks, location, direction, distance andspeed and effective route guidance information. The visually impaired peopleinevitably are confronted with great challenge when walking in complex and mobileenvironment because of the loss of visual ability. As a special group in the society,they should be given more care and attention. And one of the biggest troubles is towalk safely without other’s companionship. With the development of economy andtechnology, their troubles in traveling environment were focused.This paper firstly outlines the general situation of navigation/route guidanceaids for the blind. Then we carry out classification based on structural characteristicsand respectively introduce the historical development, application status of theelectronic travel aids, mobile guide robot, intelligent blind cane, intelligent guidesystem and route guidance aids for the blind based on haptic technology. It pointes outexisting problems at present and development trends in the future, and discusses theapplication prospect.Haptic (vibration) technical information expression is an effectivehuman-computer interaction and information transfer mode. It makes up theshortcomings of sound under certain conditions and be an important channel ofinformation transfer for the field of blind navigation/route guidance (this kind ofproducts has an obvious shortcoming that is they would lose most of the functionswhile it was noisy around. And. If the visual impaired wear headphone together, thismay block the important guiding voice outside (such as the car’s whistle)). Havingsharp sense of touch resources form the ordinary and specific cognition about theroute guidance environment(including spatial orientation, distance and walking speedetc.), this study based on integrated the application of GPS, GIS and Haptic (vibration)technology to develop a type of route guidance for the blind. To further explore this model provides different vibration to the blind under a variety of circumstances: roadkey nodes and deviation planning path. It resists the vibration noise, reflects timelyand has high effectiveness etc. It has the very high value to use. Based on GoogleLegend phone, we develop the prototype system, and then realized the designedfunctions, verify the effectiveness of the system.We initially determined the thresholds of deviating from the path, those at roadjunctions and other nodes combined with the psychological factors throughexperiments and test. And we explored the superiority of transfer channel about touchresources and the psychological threshold condition about route guidance forreminding based on the type of route guidance. The results show the following:(1)Haptic (vibration) is an effective information transfer mode for route guidance andmakes up the shortcomings of sound under certain conditions.(2). The existence ofthe psychological problems are affecting thinking, behavior, cognitive factorsaccounted for43.33%of the total in the effective questionnaire, and participants’ability to adapt social environment is generally poor.(3) The psychological thresholdsof deviation planning path are practical and reasonable, they need to be furtherimproved by optimizing in practice. Finally, we will make suggestions for routeguidance through the test or experiment, interview etc. To make the blind better feelenvironmental information, improve the spatial cognitive level, it will have the greatsignificance and practical value to the route guidance for the blind.