Running Guidance for Visually Impaired People Using Sensory Augmentation Technology Based Robotic System

Participating in sports is of great significance to people's physical and mental well-being. While physical activity is commonplace for healthy individuals, it presents challenges for those with visual impairments, as they can not rely on visual cues to perceive essential information related to sports participation, such as their surroundings. Many related studies including our previous work for assisting users in doing sports using sensory augmentation technology, which couples haptic feedback with people's desired movements, are proposed for this challenge. On the basis of these studies, we propose a system for guiding visually impaired users running outdoors using a drone-based robotic system to locate a user and a track, calculate desired moving directions, and provide haptic feedback to the user. We conduct an experiment to explore how accurately people can recognize the directions conveyed by the proposed guidance method. Subjects were asked to select their felt directions on a tablet while running on a treadmill at 6.5 km/h and 7.5 km/h. The results show subjects could recognize the cued directions with an average resolution of $\mathbf {19.8^{\circ }}$ and $\mathbf {19.6^{\circ }}$ at different speeds, respectively, and there is no significant difference exist between the two speeds. In addition, we guide users in realistic running scenarios on sports tracks. Subjects in this experiment wore an eye mask to simulate the visually impaired. They were instructed to run by following the perceived directions conveyed by haptic feedback. According to the results, they could run within a specific track 81% of the time with the proposed system.