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1. ASSIST: Evaluating the usability and performance of an indoor navigation assistant for blind and visually impaired people

   https://doi.org/10.1080/10400435.2020.1809553  

   Nair, Vishnu ; Olmschenk, Greg ; Seiple, William H. ; Zhu, Zhigang ( September 2020 , Assistive Technology)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper describes the interface and testing of an indoor navigation app - ASSIST - that guides blind & visually impaired (BVI) individuals through an indoor environment with high accuracy while augmenting their understanding of the surrounding environment. ASSIST features personalized interfaces by considering the unique experiences that BVI individuals have in indoor wayfinding and offers multiple levels of multimodal feedback. After an overview of the technical approach and implementation of the first prototype of the ASSIST system, the results of two pilot studies performed with BVI individuals are presented – a performance study to collect data on mobility (walking speed, collisions, and navigation errors) while using the app, and a usability study to collect user evaluation data on the perceived helpfulness, safety, ease-of-use, and overall experience while using the app. Our studies show that ASSIST is useful in providing users with navigational guidance, improving their efficiency and (more significantly) their safety and accuracy in wayfinding indoors. Findings and user feed-back from the studies confirm some of the previous results, while also providing some new insights into the creation of such an app, including the use of customized user interfaces and expanding the types of information provided. 

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2. CityGuide: A Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Wayfinding System for People With Vision Impairments

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3354621  

   Cheraghi, Seyed Ali ; Almadan, Ali ; Namboodiri, Vinod ( October 2019 , The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility)

   GPS accuracy is poor in indoor environments and around buildings. Thus, reading and following signs still remains the most common mechanism for providing and receiving wayfinding information in such spaces. This puts individuals who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) at a great disadvantage. This work designs, implements, and evaluates a wayfinding system and smartphone application called CityGuide that can be used by BVI individuals to navigate their surroundings beyond what is possible with just a GPS-based system. CityGuide enables an individual to query and get turn-by-turn shortest route directions from an indoor location to an outdoor location. CityGuide leverages recently developed indoor wayfinding solutions in conjunction with GPS signals to provide a seamless indoor-outdoor navigation and wayfinding system that guides a BVI individual to their desired destination through the shortest route. Evaluations of CityGuide with BVI human subjects navigating between an indoor starting point to an outdoor destination within an unfamiliar university campus scenario showed it to be effective in reducing end-to-end navigation times and distances of almost all participants. 

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3. ASSIST: Personalized Indoor Navigation via Multimodal Sensors and High-Level Semantic Information

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11024-6_9  

   Nair, V. ; Budhai, M. ; Olmschenk, G. ; Seiple, W. H. ; Zhu, Z. ( January 2019 , Leal-Taixé L., Roth S. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2018 Workshops. ECCV 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

   Blind & visually impaired (BVI) individuals and those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) each face unique challenges in navigating unfamiliar indoor environments. In this paper, we propose an indoor positioning and navigation system that guides a user from point A to point B indoors with high accuracy while augmenting their situational awareness. This system has three major components: location recognition (a hybrid indoor localization app that uses Bluetooth Low Energy beacons and Google Tango to provide high accuracy), object recognition (a body-mounted camera to provide the user momentary situational awareness of objects and people), and semantic recognition (map-based annotations to alert the user of static environmental characteristics). This system also features personalized interfaces built upon the unique experiences that both BVI and ASD individuals have in indoor wayfinding and tailors its multimodal feedback to their needs. Here, the technical approach and implementation of this system are discussed, and the results of human subject tests with both BVI and ASD individuals are presented. In addition, we discuss and show the system’s user-centric interface and present points for future work and expansion. 

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4. Exploring Virtual Environments by Visually Impaired Using a Mixed Reality Cane Without Visual Feedback

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR-Adjunct51615.2020.00028  

   Zhang, Lei ; Wu, Klevin ; Yang, Bin ; Tang, Hao ; Zhu, Zhigang ( November 2020 , ISMAR 2020 - International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality)

   null (Ed.)

   Though virtual reality (VR) has been advanced to certain levels of maturity in recent years, the general public, especially the population of the blind and visually impaired (BVI), still cannot enjoy the benefit provided by VR. Current VR accessibility applications have been developed either on expensive head-mounted displays or with extra accessories and mechanisms, which are either not accessible or inconvenient for BVI individuals. In this paper, we present a mobile VR app that enables BVI users to access a virtual environment on an iPhone in order to build their skills of perception and recognition of the virtual environment and the virtual objects in the environment. The app uses the iPhone on a selfie stick to simulate a long cane in VR, and applies Augmented Reality (AR) techniques to track the iPhone’s real-time poses in an empty space of the real world, which is then synchronized to the long cane in the VR environment. Due to the use of mixed reality (the integration of VR & AR), we call it the Mixed Reality cane (MR Cane), which provides BVI users auditory and vibrotactile feedback whenever the virtual cane comes in contact with objects in VR. Thus, the MR Cane allows BVI individuals to interact with the virtual objects and identify approximate sizes and locations of the objects in the virtual environment. We performed preliminary user studies with blind-folded participants to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed mobile approach and the results indicate that the proposed MR Cane could be effective to help BVI individuals in understanding the interaction with virtual objects and exploring 3D virtual environments. The MR Cane concept can be extended to new applications of navigation, training and entertainment for BVI individuals without more significant efforts. 

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5. A User Interface Informing Medical Staff on Continuous Indoor Environmental Quality to Support Patient Care and Airborne Disease Mitigation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SIEDS52267.2021.9483774  

   Rantas, Jacob ; Wang, David ; Jarrard, Will ; Sterchi, James ; Wang, Alan ; Varnosfaderani, Mahsa Pahlavikhah ; Heydarian, Arsalan ( April 2021 , 2021 Systems and Information Engineering Design Symposium (SIEDS))

   null (Ed.)

   This project seeks to investigate the under addressed issue of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the impacts these factors can have on human health. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought to the forefront the importance of maintaining a healthy indoor environment. Specifically, the improvement of indoor air flow has shown to reduce the risk of airborne virus exposure. This is extremely important in the context of hospitals, which contain high concentrations of atrisk individuals. Thus, the need to create a healthy indoor space is critical to improve public health and COVID-19 mitigation efforts. To create knowledge and provide insight on environmental qualities in the hospital setting, the authors have designed and built an interface to deploy in the University of Virginia Hospital Emergency Department (ED). The interface will display room-specific light, noise, temperature, CO 2 , humidity, VOC, and PM 2.5 levels measured by the low-cost Awair Omni sensor. These insights will assist ED clinicians in mitigating disease-spread and improving patient health and satisfaction while reducing caregiver burden. The team addressed the problem through agile development involving localized sensor deployment and analysis, discovery interviews with hospital clinicians and data scientists throughout, and the implementation of a human-design centered Django interface application. Furthermore, a literature survey was conducted to ascertain appropriate thresholds for the different environmental factors. Together, this work demonstrates opportunities to assist and improve patient care with environmental data. 

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