Paper Info
Title
Turn Right: Analysis of Rotation Errors in Turn-by-Turn Navigation for Individuals with Visual Impairments.
Abstract
Navigation assistive technologies aim to improve the mobility of blind or visually impaired people. In particular, turn-by-turn navigation assistants provide sequential instructions to enable autonomous guidance towards a destination. A problem frequently addressed in the literature is to obtain accurate position and orientation of the user during such guidance. An orthogonal challenge, often overlooked in the literature, is how precisely navigation instructions are followed by users. In particular, imprecisions in following rotation instructions lead to rotation errors that can significantly affect navigation. Indeed, a relatively small error during a turn is amplified by the following frontal movement and can lead the user towards incorrect or dangerous paths. In this contribution, we study rotation errors and their effect on turn-by-turn guidance for individuals with visual impairments. We analyze a dataset of indoor trajectories of 11 blind participants guided along three routes through a multi-story shopping mall using NavCog, a turn-by-turn smartphone navigation assistant. We find that participants extend rotations by 17º on average. The error is not proportional to the expected rotation; instead, it is accentuated for "slight turns" (22.5º-60º), while "ample turns" (60º-120º) are consistently approximated to 90º. We generalize our findings as design considerations for engineering navigation assistance in real-world scenarios.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1145/3234695.3236363
ASSETS
Keywords
Field
DocType
Visual impairments and Blindness,Navigation Assistive Technologies,Orientation and Mobility
Computer science,Navigation assistance,Turn-by-turn navigation,Human–computer interaction,Orientation and Mobility,Shopping mall
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5650-3
3
0.41
References 
Authors
12
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dragan Ahmetovic116621.09
Uran Oh213310.42
Sergio Mascetti349439.13
Chieko Asakawa491186.45