Implementing blind navigation through multi-modal sensing and gait guidance

TL;DR

This paper introduces a wearable blind guiding device that combines gait phase analysis and multimodal sensing to improve navigation assistance for visually impaired individuals, demonstrating superior performance over traditional guide canes.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel gait-based guiding system integrated with multimodal sensing for enhanced blind navigation, outperforming standard guide canes in experiments.

Findings

Superior guidance performance compared to guide cane

Effective indoor and outdoor navigation results

Successful integration of gait analysis with environmental sensing

Abstract

By the year 2023, the global population of individuals with impaired vision has surpassed 220 million. People with impaired vision will find it difficult while finding path or avoiding obstacles, and must ask for auxiliary tools for help. Although traditional aids such as guide canes and guide dogs exist, they still have some shortcomings. In this paper, we present our wearable blind guiding device, what perform navigation guidance through our proposed Gait-based Guiding System. Our device innovatively integrates gait phase analysis for walking guide, and in terms of environmental perception, we use multimodal sensing to acquire diverse environment information. During the experiment, we conducted both indoor and outdoor experiments, and compared with the standard guide cane. The result shows superior performance of our device in blind guidance.