An IMU and RFID-based Navigation System Providing Vibrotactile Feedback for Visually Impaired People
This paper presents the DOVI (Device for Orientation of the Visually Impaired) system, a new inertial and RFID-based wearable navigation device for indoor environments providing vibrotactile feedback to visually impaired people for reaching a target place
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Abstract. This paper presents the DOVI (Device for Orientation of the Visually Impaired) system, a new inertial and RFID-based wearable navigation device for indoor environments providing vibrotactile feedback to visually impaired people for reaching a target place. The DOVI system is based on sensor fusion techniques, allowing a precise and global localization of the pedestrian thanks to inertial measurements from accelerometers and gyroscope and passive RFID tags. The pedestrian is provided a haptic feedback through a vibrotactile bracelet, that can guide him/her through the correct path toward the target. The DOVI system is complementary to both those systems allowing the detection of mobile obstacles along the path and to other aids, such as the white cane or the guide dog. Keywords: Haptic feedback · Pedestrian navigation Wearable assistive device · Visually impaired
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Sensor fusion
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Introduction
Navigation aids can provide information about correct heading direction and appropriate route selection to pedestrians who are visually impaired through Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs) and smart phones. The estimation of user’s location and the orientation can be achieved outdoor with Global Positioning System (GPS) (e.g., [17]), that unfortunately is not reliable enough within indoor environments (e.g., workplaces and public buildings such as hospital and airports), where degradation and distortion of the GPS signal are introduced. In recent years, to overcome the above limitations, alternative solutions addressing in-door localization have been proposed either based on an external infrastructure or configured as autonomous solutions, although none of them has been effective enough to lead to off-the-shelf navigation systems for visually impaired people. External infrastructure solutions are usually based on sensor network technologies (e.g., Ultra Wide Band (UWB), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 F. Bello et al. (Eds.): EuroHaptics 2016, Part I, LNCS 9774, pp. 360–370, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42321-0 33
A Novel Navigation System for Visually Impaired People
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Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), requiring the placement of either sensors or tags in the environment. Their performance can not reach sufficiently high levels of accuracy [12], i.e. lower than 1 m, since it is depending of various factors, such as signal power, interference and number of cells or used antennas. On the other side, autonomous solutions are independent of external infrastructures and usually rely on inertial sensors (e.g., Inertial Measurement Unit IMU) consisting of accelerometers (linear acceleration) and gyroscopes (angular velocity) [6], even if their accuracy is influenced both by drift error due to the integration of signals affected by noise [3] and by the relative (non absolute) estimation of the person position and orientation with respect to the initial value (Dead Reckoning). In the context of assistive devices for indoor navigation of visually impaired pedestrians, several s
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