HCC: Medium: Multisensory maps for inclusive indoor navigation by people with visual impairments

University Of Maine, Orono ME

Investigators

Abstract

This project addresses one of the most basic, yet most critical behaviors of daily life: safe navigation in complex indoor environments. Such navigation is one of the most challenging problems faced by the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community, and one that is not adequately addressed by current assistive technology. The goal of this project is to combine accessible route and map information into a first-of-its-kind unified multisensory route-map navigation system to improve the accuracy, confidence, efficiency, and safety of indoor navigation for BVI travelers. The project addresses two longstanding limitations of current assistive navigation technologies: (1) insufficient access to navigation-critical information caused by reliance on unimodal interfaces using speech or touch in isolation (rather than employing multimodal channels of environmental information to maximize learnability and redundancy) and (2) a focus on supporting outdoor travel rather than indoor navigation (people spend almost 90% of their time inside, yet indoor spaces have a dearth of accessible navigation tools). The proposed system focusing on indoor environments will have a significant and immediate societal impact as it can be implemented to support learning and navigation of complex buildings related to work, education (university campuses), medical facilities, or any indoor environments that must be safely and efficiently navigated as part of daily life. This outcome is important given that BVI individuals have significantly lower educational and vocational attainment and increased social isolation compared to their sighted peers. The new route-map tool and disseminated guidelines will usher in a new era of multi-use, multisensory accessible navigation system development, inclusive design that is currently lacking in accessible navigation technology. The accessible navigation tool designed and evaluated in this project will combine new theories of multisensory human information processing and innovative multimodal interface design in an inclusive and multi-use system. The project is guided by three principal objectives (1) to identify the best information-access requirements needed to support indoor navigation for BVI individuals and to optimize the information delivery via new bio-inspired, multisensory smartphone interfaces, (2) to use these basic results to develop a prototype route-map tool for conveying combined turn-by-turn route information and map overviews, and (3) to evaluate the prototype tool for supporting spatial learning, navigation, and usability through rigorous, inclusive user studies. Research findings will provide new insight about theories of multisensory spatial information processing in both blind and sighted humans. Project outcomes will also contribute to development of much-needed multisensory design guidelines specifying the best information/modality pairings supporting information-access, spatial learning, and navigation for BVI people across the spectrum of visual status. Technical advancements from the project will lead to development of a new software framework for implementing these guidelines in optimized multisensory interfaces that will simplify future design of accessible BVI navigation technology. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.