Haptic Feedback to Assist Blind People in Indoor Environment Using Vibration Patterns.

Feedback is one of the significant factors for the mental mapping of an environment. It is the communication of spatial information to blind people to perceive the surroundings. The assistive smartphone technologies deliver feedback for different activities using several feedback mediums, including voice, sonification and vibration. Researchers 0have proposed various solutions for conveying feedback messages to blind people using these mediums. Voice and sonification feedback are effective solutions to convey information. However, these solutions are not applicable in a noisy environment and may occupy the most important auditory sense. The privacy of a blind user can also be compromised with speech feedback. The vibration feedback could effectively be used as an alternative approach to these mediums. This paper proposes a real-time feedback system specifically designed for blind people to convey information to them based on vibration patterns. The proposed solution has been evaluated through an empirical study by collecting data from 24 blind people through a mixed-mode survey using a questionnaire. Results show the average recognition accuracy for 10 different vibration patterns are 90%, 82%, 75%, 87%, 65%, and 70%.

Technology-assisted white cane: evaluation and future directions.

BACKGROUND: Several technology-assisted aids are available to help blind and visually impaired people perform their daily activities. The current research uses the state-of-the-art technology to enhance the utility of traditional navigational aids to produce solutions that are more reliable. In this regard, a white cane is no exception, which is supplemented with the existing technologies to design Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs), Electronic Orientation Aids (EOAs), and Position Locator Devices (PLDs). Although several review articles uncover the strengths and limitations of research contributions that extend traditional navigational aids, we find no review article that covers research contributions on a technology-assisted white cane. The authors attempt to fill this literature gap by reviewing the most relevant research articles published during 2010-2017 with the common objective of enhancing the utility of white cane with the existing technology. METHODS: The authors have collected the relevant literature published during 2010-17 by searching and browsing all the major digital libraries and publishers' websites. The inclusion/exclusion criteria were applied to select the research articles that are relevant to the topic of this review article, and all other irrelevant papers were excluded. Among the 577 (534 through database searching and 43 through other sources) initially screened papers, the authors collected 228 full-text articles, which after applying exclusion/inclusion criteria resulted in 36 papers that were included in the evaluation, comparison, and discussion. This also includes research articles of commercially available aids published before the specified range. RESULTS: The findings show that the research trend is shifting towards developing a technology-assisted white cane solution that is applicable in both indoor and outdoor environments to aid blind users in navigation. In this regard, exploiting smartphones to develop low-cost and user-friendly navigation solution is among the best research opportunities to explore. In addition, the authors contribute a theoretical evaluation framework to compare and evaluate the state-of-the-art solutions, identify research trends and future directions. DISCUSSION: Researchers have been in the quest to find out ways of enhancing the utility of white cane using existing technology. However, for a more reliable enhancement, the design should have user-centric characteristics. It should be portable, reliable, trust-worthy, lightweight, less costly, less power hungry, and require minimal training with special emphasis on its ergonomics and social acceptance. Smartphones, which are the ubiquitous and general-purpose portable devices, should be considered to exploit its capabilities in making technology-assisted white cane smarter and reliable.

Evaluation of Medical Image Registration Techniques Based on Nature and Domain of the Transformation.

A lot of research has been done during the past 20 years in the area of medical image registration for obtaining detailed, important, and complementary information from two or more images and aligning them into a single, more informative image. Nature of the transformation and domain of the transformation are two important medical image registration techniques that deal with characters of objects (motions) in images. This article presents a detailed survey of the registration techniques that belong to both categories with detailed elaboration on their features, issues, and challenges. An investigation estimating similarity and dissimilarity measures and performance evaluation is the main objective of this work. This article also provides reference knowledge in a compact form for researchers and clinicians looking for the proper registration technique for a particular application.