Auxílio à mobilidade de deficientes visuais por meio de sensores humanos.

Abstract

Although visually impaired individuals have great ability to adapt to a variety of situations through other senses, they still face some limitations, such as safe locomotion. Human navigation is a complex behavior, which depends mainly on vision. Therefore, for a visually impaired person, locomotion is a difficult task, especially in some situations, such as in unfamiliar surroundings or close to urban traffic. Map-based navigation applications provide significant help with guidance, mobility and location support, as well as with estimation of directions and distances. However, this kind of users still find great difficulties in accessing spatial information, since the interaction with this type of application is performed, mainly, through the vision. Thus, a study was carried out with the visually impaired to understand their main mobility needs, aiming at developing an accessible and collaborative mobility solution. The proposed solution includes a mobile application with accessible maps and sound effects, able to help the mobility of this type of users, taking into account possible obstacles in their paths and describing the environment in terms of Points of Interest (POI) around them and around a specific direction indicated by the user. In order to reach this goal, the Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) technique was used, since it has been shown to be efficient and low cost in obtaining geographic information. An experimental evaluation was conducted to evaluate the quality of the data obtained collaboratively, as well as experiments involving volunteer participants, in order to evaluate whether the proposed solution is satisfactory to mitigate the problems related to navigation of the visually impaired population. Finally, the results obtained in the experiments were encouraging, demonstrating that the proposed solution may be satisfactory for visually impaired users.