Guiding Blind People with Haptic Feedback

Maintaining orientation while traveling in complex or unknown environments is a challenging task for visually impaired (VI) pedestrians. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to assist blind people during navigation between waypoints (walk straight) with tactors on their wrists. Our main goal is to decrease the cognitive load needed by blind people to follow instructions in overloaded environments. Two issues are discussed, 1) the number of vibration motors used; 2) the type of vibration dimensions issued. Preliminary results from of an informal evaluation performed with two blind users showed that vibrations could help the users maintaining their straight path, however patterns were sometimes confusing. This reinforced that walking an unknown path is a demanding and stressful task and the cognitive load should be reduced