Authors: Oana Bălan, Alin Moldoveanu, Florica Moldoveanu
in: 9th International Conference on Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction, 2015
Abstract: The blind people face serious difficulties concerning exclusion from working activities, lack of social involvement and having a sedentary lifestyle. The blind individuals can, however, enhance their life quality by using powerful and effective assistive devices that would help them to perform navigational and orientation tasks and to build a rich mental representation of the environment. An assistive system for the visually impaired people needs to fulfill certain usability requirements, such as to be wearable and affordable and to provide a large quantity of information as efficiently as possible in order to give the user a natural-like perception of the settings. The purpose of our research is to develop an assistive device for the blind people, based on alternative sensory modalities, such as hearing (by encoding the visual information into sound) and touch (by providing additional information through vibrations and other haptic cues). This paper presents the results achieved so far in our research, concerning the sonification and training techniques that will be applied for the development of the proposed assistive system.
Download link: BINAURAL-SOUND-ANALYSIS-AND-SPATIAL-LOCALIZATION-FOR-THE-VISUALLY-IMPAIRED-PEOPLE.pdf (529 downloads)
