A remote guidance system for blind and visually impaired people via vibrotactile haptic feedback S. Scheggi, A. Talarico, D. Prattichizzo Abstract— Trained guide dogs and canes provide the visually impaired with the highest degree of independence; however, they are very limited in guiding the user towards a specific desired location, especially in an unknown environment. The assistance of other people represents a feasible solution, but it does not improve the idea of autonomous guidance and privacy. In this paper we present a remote guidance system which provides the visually impaired with haptic directional cues, useful for navigating in unknown environments. The blind user is equipped with a pair of camera glasses, two vibrotactile bracelets and a cane which is used to avoid potential obstacles. The video captured by the camera glasses is streamed to a remote operator who can properly navigate the impaired person by activating the vibrotactile stimulations. The proposed approach has been validated on a group of blind subjects in an indoor scenario. Results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for the guidance of visually impaired in unknown environments. I. I NTRODUCTION Visually impaired people encounter many difficulties in living an autonomous life, due to the reduced capability to perceive the surrounding environment. In particular, navi- gation and orientation seem to be very challenging when moving in unknown domains. Trained guide dogs and canes are useful for collision avoidance and obstacle warning but they do not provide directional information to guide visually impaired toward a desired location. Assistive devices represent considerable solutions in improving the quality of life for subjects with impairments. The development of mobility aids for the blind represents a challenging task. The nature of blindness requires that assistive technologies provide location and situational awareness, displaying this information effectively and when needed. Remote guidance systems have been recently developed in literature. The aim is to blend the information provided by assistive technologies with the computational capabilities of a human operator. In [1], the authors developed a remote guidance system where the visually impaired was equipped with a digital camera, a GPS receiver and a headset. Internet and GSM connections transmitted video/audio information and GPS data between the remote operator and the user. Using audio communication, the operator navigated the blind The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement n. 601165 of the project “WEARHAP - WEARable HAPtics for humans and robots”. S. Scheggi, A. Talarico and D. Prattichizzo are with Department of In- formation Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy. D. Prattichizzo is also with the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, 16163, Italy {scheggi, talarico, prattichizzo}@dii.unisi.it (1) (2) (3) (4) Fig. 1. System overview. The visually impaired (1) is guided by a remote operator (2) via two vibrotactile bracelets (3). A pair of camera glasses (4) streams the view of the blind user to the remote operator so that he can properly guide the subject to the desired location. toward a desired location and warned him about possible obstacles. Similar systems were developed in [2], [3], [4], for visually impaired pedestrians and in [5] combining GPS technology with RFID for indoor pre-localization. All the aforementioned researches did not use haptic as a possible mean of communication. Haptic stimuli for blind navigation have been proposed in [6]. The proposed indoor localization system relied on Bluetooth communication and provided surrounding environ- ment information by means of vibrotactile stimuli displayed to the chest and to the shoulders of the user. In [7], a com- parison of different vibrotactile devices for guiding visually impaired individuals was proposed. The authors evaluated different vibration temporization and intensities. In [8], the authors developed an electronic bracelet which provided vibrations when an obstacle was close to the user. The vibration magnitude was directly proportional to the obstacle distance. A similar haptic policy was developed in [9] for the navigation of blind in virtual reality scenarios. Recently, vibrotactile stimuli for cooperative human-robot navigation were proposed in [10]. None of the aforementioned works proposed a remote guidance system which provided the impaired user with haptic directional cues. Some issues are involved in the remote guidance systems described above. For example, GPS localization may suffer of accuracy issues and indoor signal reception. According to [11], [12], headset used to transmit audio messages may 2014 22nd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED) University of Palermo. June 16-19, 2014. Palermo, Italy 978-1-4799-5901-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE 20