Haptic Assistive Bracelets for Blind Skier Guidance

Blindness dramatically limits quality of life of individuals and has profound implications for the person affected and the society as a whole. Physical mobility and exercises are strongly spurred within people, as ways to maintain health and well-being. Such activities can be really important for people with disability as well, and their increase is paramount in the well-being and assistive care system. In this work, we aim at improving the communication between the instructor and a visual impaired subject during skiing. Up to now, only the auditory channel is used to communicate basic commands to the skier. We introduce a novel use of haptic feedback in this context. In particular, the skier can receive directional information through two vibrating bracelets worn on the forearms. Haptic interaction has been proven to be processed faster by the brain demanding a less cognitive effort with respect to the auditory modality. The connection between the instructor and the skier is done by Bluetooth protocol. We tested different guiding modalities including only audio commands, audio and haptic commands and only haptic commands. Preliminary results on the use of the system reveled the haptic channel to be a promising way for guidance of blind people in winter sports.