Cues for Vibro - tactile Route Guidance

In today’s modern and fast-paced world mobility is getting more and more important. One of the challenges with that is orientation in unknown places. Supporting technologies exist e.g. in the form of navigation devices, where most of them convey information through the auditory or visual channel. The modalities hearing and seeing have the advantage of being well explored and commonly used, but can also be problematic: their use can be distracting, information may be overlooked due to information overload, they are limited for people with impaired vision or the blind, and there are situations where they can be blocked (e.g. noisy environments, darkness, fog,. . . ). This motivates the use of another modality: the sense of touch. Related works have already shown that it is possible to guide people between points that are several 100s of meters apart. In their research GPS was used for tracking and a large field and a forest served as the testing ground. The goal of this work was to show that (i) accurate route guidance is possible on a much smaller scale with waypoints which are only 1.5m apart, (ii) encoding distance information in the tactile cues will improve walking accuracy (participants should walk faster and with less detours) and provide situation awareness, and (iii) multimodal notification (by means of hearing the noise of vibrating tactors) will further increase accuracy. In the course of this work software was developed to get position information from the indoor tracking system, calculate tactile cues and send them to a vibro-tactile belt. In total 7 experiments testing 4 different types of cues have been conducted with 10 participants. Results showed that (i) indoor route guiding is possible. (ii) It could not be proven that distance information improves performance but equal performance to the baseline experiments was reached. However, a positive effect was achieved: almost half of the