Supporting Navigation of Outdoor Shopping Complexes for Visually-impaired Users through Multi-modal Data Fusion
This addresses a specific navigation challenge for visually-impaired individuals in outdoor shopping complexes, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing assistive technology concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of navigating outdoor shopping complexes for visually-impaired users by developing a mobile app called iExplore, which was experimentally validated with users and showed potential to fill a practical gap in assistive technologies.
Outdoor shopping complexes (OSC) are extremely difficult for people with visual impairment to navigate. Existing GPS devices are mostly designed for roadside navigation and seldom transition well into an OSC-like setting. We report our study on the challenges faced by a blind person in navigating OSC through developing a new mobile application named iExplore. We first report an exploratory study aiming at deriving specific design principles for building this system by learning the unique challenges of the problem. Then we present a methodology that can be used to derive the necessary information for the development of iExplore, followed by experimental validation of the technology by a group of visually impaired users in a local outdoor shopping center. User feedback and other experiments suggest that iExplore, while at its very initial phase, has the potential of filling a practical gap in existing assistive technologies for the visually impaired.