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Gaining insight for the design, development, deployment and distribution of assistive navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people through a detailed user requirements elicitation

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Abstract

The autonomy, independence, productivity and, in general, quality of life of people with visual impairments often rely significantly on their ability to use new assistive technologies. In particular, their ability to navigate by foot, use means of transport and visit indoor spaces may be greatly enhanced by the use of assistive navigation systems. In this paper, a detailed analysis of user needs and requirements is presented concerning the design and development of assisting navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people (BVIs). To this end, the elicited user needs and requirements from interviews with the BVIs are processed and classified into seven main categories. Interestingly, one of the categories represents the requirements of the BVIs to be trained on the use of the mobile apps that would be included in an assistive navigation system. The need of the BVIs to be confident in their ability to safely use the apps revealed the requirement that training versions of the apps should be available. These versions would be able to simulate real-world conditions during the training process. The requirements elicitation and classification reported in this paper aim to offer insight into the design, development, deployment and distribution of assistive navigation systems for the BVIs.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Costas Filios, who is heavily involved with the implementation of the code of the outdoor navigation smartphone application.

Funding

This research was funded by the Greek RTDI State Aid Action RESEARCH-CREATE-INNOVATE of the National Operational Programme Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship and Innovation 2014–2020 in the framework of the T1RCI-00593 MANTO project.

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  1. Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, 18534, Piraeus, Greece

    Paraskevi Theodorou & Apostolos Meliones

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  1. Paraskevi Theodorou
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Contributions

P.T. and A.M. involved in conceptualization; P.T. took part in data curation; P.T. involved in formal analysis; P.T. took part in investigation; P.T. and A.M. involved in methodology; A.M. took part in project administration; A.M. involved in supervision; P.T. involved in writing—original draft; P.T. and Α.Μ. involved in writing—review & editing; all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Paraskevi Theodorou.

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Theodorou, P., Meliones, A. Gaining insight for the design, development, deployment and distribution of assistive navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people through a detailed user requirements elicitation. Univ Access Inf Soc 22, 841–867 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-022-00885-9

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