Assessing Mobility of Blind and Low-Vision Individuals through a Portable Virtual Reality System and a Comprehensive Questionnaire
Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2024

Blind or low-vision (BLV) individuals often have reduced independent mobility, yet new aids fails in increasing it, are not adopted enough, or both. A major cause is a severe deficiency in how mobility aids are assessed in the field: there are no established methods or measures and those used often have poor relevancy, insight affordances, and reproducibility; probing how actual BLV participants regard a proposed aid and how they compare to current aids is rare; and crucially, tests feature too few BLV participants. In this work two tools are introduced to alleviate this: a portable, large-scale-exploration, virtual reality (VR) system; and a comprehensive, aid-agnostic questionnaire focused on BLV mobility. The questionnaire has been validated once with eight orientation and mobility experts and six BLV respondents. Further, both it and the VR system have been applied in aid assessment with 19 BLV participants in a separate study. The VR system is to our knowledge the first in the field designed for portable evaluation, helping considerably in recruiting adequate numbers of BLV participants, for instance by allowing for testing in participants' homes; while also supporting reproducible and motivated tests and analyses. The questionnaire provides a systematic method to investigate respondents' views of numerous important facets of a proposed mobility aid, and how they relate to other aids. These tools should assist in achieving a widely adopted aid that meaningfully improves its users' mobility.

virtual reality

electronic travel aids

low vision

sensory substitution

virtual environments

mobility aids

visual impairment

patient-reported outcome measures

Blindness

sensory supplementation

Författare

Johan Isaksson-Daun

Institutionen för Biomedicinsk Teknik

Chalmers, Industri- och materialvetenskap, Design & Human Factors

Thomas Jansson

Institutionen för Biomedicinsk Teknik

Skånes universitetssjukhus (SUS)

Lunds universitet

Johan Nilsson

Institutionen för Biomedicinsk Teknik

IEEE Access

2169-3536 (ISSN) 21693536 (eISSN)

Vol. 12 146089-146106

Ämneskategorier

Annan maskinteknik

DOI

10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3471177

Mer information

Senast uppdaterat

2024-11-02