David Antón Sánchez

Bachelor Thesis Student

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Bachelor Thesis

OpenVNAVI: A Vibrotactile Navigation Aid for the Visually Impaired

Supervisor:

René Bohne

Abstract:

According to the World Health Organization 285 million people worldwide are estimated to have a degree of visual impairment, with 39 million of them suffering from complete vision loss.

The current degree of technological development of many fields has brought and continues to bring comforts and life-changing improvements to our lives: smartphones, GPS, self-driving cars, etc. However, blind and visually impaired (BVI) people still rely on century-old methods for navigating the world on their own:

The white cane, a simple, affordable tool used by the BVI community as an obstacle detection device by means of direct interaction with the obstacles; and the guide dog, used as an obstacle avoidance and navigation aid, although not affordable for the vast majority of the BVI community.

The aim of this Bachelor Thesis is to create a low-cost system based on vibrotactile feedback that improves upon the functionality of the guide dog as an obstacle avoidance and a navigation aid, allowing more BVI users to navigate the world easily and safely.

First, an exploration of the related work from the past decades is performed, analyzing the state of the art and the current areas of research. Then, the author analyzes the requirements and describes the implementation of all the features and components of the system. After that, an evaluation of the implementation of the system is performed. Finally, an exploration of the possible future development is presented.

Publications

2016

• Philipp Wacker, Chat Wacharamanotham, Daniel Spelmezan, Jan Thar, David A. Sánchez, René Bohne and Jan Borchers. VibroVision: An On-Body Tactile Image Guide for the Blind.  In Extended Abstracts of the CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3788–3791, ACM, New York, NY, USA, May 2016.
  

2015

• David Antón Sánchez. OpenVNAVI: A Vibrotactile Aid for the Visually Impaired. Bachelor's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, August 2015.