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Audio Guided Driving for People with Blindness with Seated Self-balancing Personal Transporters

Authors:
Andreas Hub
Jutta Cook

Keywords: Interaction-driven accessibility; visual impairments; self-balancing personal transporter; physical therapy training

Abstract:
This paper presents a new approach to increase the range of mobility for people with blindness or severe visual impairments, while enhancing interaction-driven accessibility with sighted people. For the blind or visually impaired, covering longer distances often poses a special challenge; prolonged use of a cane or leaning on a sighted person can be exhausting and can lead to unhealthy and non-ergonomic motions. Guided use of a modified seated, self-balanced single person vehicle enhances accessibility of various environments, serves as physical training, offers great experiences and fosters both self-esteem and independence – thus serving as a catalyst for positive changes in many different aspects of life. Moving together constitutes implicit social interaction and social participation. In this paper, we describe the practical implementation and address challenges concerning the blind drivers’ perception of velocity and direction of movement. We expect these challenges to be solved in the near future through the application of either existing or new haptic devices. Our tests with persons having visual, other sensory, or mobility impairments show that they are perfectly capable of driving an AddSeat®, which contributed to significantly increasing accessible environments, enhanced their mobility, expanded their social interaction, increased their physical fitness and greatly improved their general outlook on life.

Pages: 1 to 4

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: March 25, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8378

ISBN: 978-1-61208-622-4

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from March 25, 2018 to March 29, 2018