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Model of Cognitive Mobility for Visually Impaired and its Experimental Validation

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Mobility of Visually Impaired People

Abstract

This paper reports the results of three experiments on tactile perception, spatial representation, and tactile display design for assistive mobility devices for blind, partially sighted, and deaf blind people. The results indicate the potentials of tactile displays for supporting environmental exploration and mobility. Voluntary test subjects showed reasonably good ability to determine the direction of motion of an arrow, with best recognition rates in the up and right directions. They showed reasonably good ability to use a tactile display to detect and avoid obstacles after a very short learning period and more limited ability to learn and remember an environmental representation using information from a tactile display and walking through the environment without specific instructions.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been financially supported by several institutions: the CNRS (ROBEA program), the French Ministry of Education and the Mexican CONACYT Research Agency, the CEA (Commissariat à l’Energy Atomique et aux energies renouvellables), and the European Commission (AsTERICS FP7 project). We thank all of them for their support.

We would like to thank our undergraduate and master students and the MIT students (trainees in our research group) who participated in implementation of the experiments presented in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Rouen Normandie, Rouen, France

    Edwige Pissaloux

  2. Universidad Panamericana, Aguascalientes, Mexico

    Ramiro Velázquez

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  1. Edwige Pissaloux
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  2. Ramiro Velázquez
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Correspondence to Edwige Pissaloux .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Rouen Normandie, Rouen, France

    Edwige Pissaloux

  2. Universidad Panamericana, Aguascalientes, Mexico

    Ramiro Velazquez

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Pissaloux, E., Velázquez, R. (2018). Model of Cognitive Mobility for Visually Impaired and its Experimental Validation. In: Pissaloux, E., Velazquez, R. (eds) Mobility of Visually Impaired People. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54446-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54446-5_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54444-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54446-5

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