Studying the Navigation Assistance System for the Visually Impaired and Blind Persons and ICT use by their Caretakers

Telecare solutions have been seen as a potential means of addressing the future care needs of ageing societies. With the growing proportion of dependent people (ageing, disabled users), tele-assistance and tele-monitoring platforms will play a significant role to provide an efficient and less-costly remote care and support. It will allow aged and disabled persons to maintain their independence and lessen the burden and cost of caregiving. In the case of visually impaired (VIP) and blind persons, guide dog and white cane provide them a fair degree of independence. However, those are very limited in guiding the user towards a specific desired location, especially in an unknown environment. The assistance of other people presents a feasible solution, though it does not improve the idea of autonomous guidance and privacy. This paper presents a tele-guidance based navigation assistance system that is based on the idea that a blind or VIP pedestrian can be assisted by haptics based cues and spoken instructions from a remote caretaker who receives a live video stream from a camera carried by the blind or VIP. Also, we present results of the study conducted in Pakistan with 14 blind and VIP participants for testing haptics user interface concept of proposed teleguidance system. In this study also two caretakers are interviewed. In addition, we present results of the attitude towards assistive technology study conducted with 19 blind and VIP in Finland. Moreover, we introduce the environmental model to aid development of assistive tools for blind and VIP.