Prototyping Wearables for Supporting Cognitive Mapping by the Blind: Lessons from Co-Creation Workshops

This paper describes the co-creation workshops we carried out with three groups composed of blind users, mobility instructors, designers, and computer engineering students. The wearables prototyped by these groups combine verbalized warnings with haptic and audio feedback aiming at supporting blind persons in the task of identifying landmarks. The identification of landmarks is an essential skill required for the cognitive mapping and spatial representation. Since 2013 we have been worked on the investigation of wearables for supporting landmark identification and, thus, the cognitive mapping by the blind. The prototypes we describe in this paper were used in 82 trials in 2 empirical studies and are now being replicated for supporting mobility-training sessions. Keywords Blind Mobility, Spatial Representation, Landmark Identification, Wearable Computing.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MOBISYS
• Authors: Wallace Ugulino, Hugo Fuks
• Keywords: Computer Networks, MOBISYS 2015