Implementing blind navigation through multi-modal sensing and gait guidance
This addresses navigation challenges for the over 220 million people with impaired vision, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing assistive technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of navigation for visually impaired individuals by developing a wearable device that uses gait phase analysis and multimodal sensing for guidance, showing superior performance compared to standard guide canes in indoor and outdoor experiments.
By the year 2023, the global population of individuals with impaired vision has surpassed 220 million. People with impaired vision will find it difficult while finding path or avoiding obstacles, and must ask for auxiliary tools for help. Although traditional aids such as guide canes and guide dogs exist, they still have some shortcomings. In this paper, we present our wearable blind guiding device, what perform navigation guidance through our proposed Gait-based Guiding System. Our device innovatively integrates gait phase analysis for walking guide, and in terms of environmental perception, we use multimodal sensing to acquire diverse environment information. During the experiment, we conducted both indoor and outdoor experiments, and compared with the standard guide cane. The result shows superior performance of our device in blind guidance.