A context aware handheld wayfinding system for individuals with cognitive impairments

A challenge to individuals with cognitive impairments in wayfinding is how to remain oriented, recall routines, and travel in unfamiliar areas in a way relying on limited cognitive capacity. According to psychological model of spatial navigation and the requirements of rehabilitation professionals, a novel wayfinding system is presented with an aim to increase workplace and life independence for people suffering from diseases such as traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, schizophrenia, Down syndromes, and Alzheimer's disease. This paper describes an approach to providing distributed cognition support of travel guidance for persons with cognitive disabilities. The unique strength of the system is the ability to provide unique-to-the-user prompts that are triggered by context. As this population is very sensitive to issues of abstraction (e.g. icons) and presents the designer with the need to tailor prompts to a 'universe-of-one' the use of images specific to each user and context is implemented. The key to the approach is to spread the context awareness across the system, with the context being flagged by the QR-code tags and the appropriate response being evoked by displaying the appropriate path guidance images indexed by the intersection of specific end-user and context ID embedded in the tags. By separating the context trigger from the pictorial response, responses can be updated independently of the rest of the installed system, and a single QR-code tag can trigger multiple responses in the PDA depending on the end-user and their specific path. A prototype is built and tested in field experiments with real patients. The experimental results show the human-computer interface is friendly and the capabilities of wayfinding are reliable.