HCC: Medium: Multisensory maps for inclusive indoor navigation by people with visual impairments

该项目解决了日常生活中最基本，但也是最关键的行为之一：在复杂的室内环境中安全导航。这种导航是盲人和视障人士（BVI）社区面临的最具挑战性的问题之一，也是目前辅助技术无法充分解决的问题。该项目的目标是将可访问的路线和地图信息结合到一个统一的多感官路线图导航系统中，以提高英属维尔京群岛旅行者室内导航的准确性、信心、效率和安全性。该项目解决了当前辅助导航技术的两个长期限制：(1)对导航关键信息的访问不足，这是由于依赖于孤立地使用语音或触摸的单模态界面（而不是利用多模态环境信息渠道来最大限度地提高可学习性和冗余性）；(2)侧重于支持户外旅行而不是室内导航（人们几乎90%的时间都在室内度过，但室内空间缺乏可访问的导航工具）。该系统将对室内环境产生重大而直接的社会影响，因为它可以用于支持与工作、教育（大学校园）、医疗设施或任何室内环境相关的复杂建筑的学习和导航，这些室内环境必须作为日常生活的一部分进行安全有效的导航。这一结果很重要，因为与视力正常的同龄人相比，英属维尔京群岛个人的教育和职业成就明显较低，社会孤立程度更高。新的路线图工具和传播指南将迎来一个多用途、多感官无障碍导航系统开发和包容性设计的新时代，这是目前无障碍导航技术所缺乏的。本项目设计和评估的无障碍导航工具将在一个包容性和多用途系统中结合多感官人类信息处理的新理论和创新的多模式界面设计。该项目以三个主要目标为指导：(1)确定支持英属维尔京群岛个人室内导航所需的最佳信息获取需求，并通过新的生物启发、多感官智能手机界面优化信息传递；(2)利用这些基本结果开发一个原型路线图工具，用于传递综合的逐向路线信息和地图概述；(3)评估支持空间学习、导航、导航和导航的原型工具。和可用性通过严格的，包容性的用户研究。研究结果将为盲人和正常人的多感官空间信息处理理论提供新的见解。项目成果还将有助于制定急需的多感官设计指南，指定最佳信息/模式配对，支持英属维尔京群岛不同视觉状态人群的信息获取、空间学习和导航。该项目的技术进步将导致开发新的软件框架，用于在优化的多感官界面中实施这些指导方针，从而简化未来易访问的BVI导航技术的设计。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project addresses one of the most basic, yet most critical behaviors of daily life: safe navigation in complex indoor environments. Such navigation is one of the most challenging problems faced by the blind and visually impaired (BVI) community, and one that is not adequately addressed by current assistive technology. The goal of this project is to combine accessible route and map information into a first-of-its-kind unified multisensory route-map navigation system to improve the accuracy, confidence, efficiency, and safety of indoor navigation for BVI travelers. The project addresses two longstanding limitations of current assistive navigation technologies: (1) insufficient access to navigation-critical information caused by reliance on unimodal interfaces using speech or touch in isolation (rather than employing multimodal channels of environmental information to maximize learnability and redundancy) and (2) a focus on supporting outdoor travel rather than indoor navigation (people spend almost 90% of their time inside, yet indoor spaces have a dearth of accessible navigation tools). The proposed system focusing on indoor environments will have a significant and immediate societal impact as it can be implemented to support learning and navigation of complex buildings related to work, education (university campuses), medical facilities, or any indoor environments that must be safely and efficiently navigated as part of daily life. This outcome is important given that BVI individuals have significantly lower educational and vocational attainment and increased social isolation compared to their sighted peers. The new route-map tool and disseminated guidelines will usher in a new era of multi-use, multisensory accessible navigation system development, inclusive design that is currently lacking in accessible navigation technology.The accessible navigation tool designed and evaluated in this project will combine new theories of multisensory human information processing and innovative multimodal interface design in an inclusive and multi-use system. The project is guided by three principal objectives (1) to identify the best information-access requirements needed to support indoor navigation for BVI individuals and to optimize the information delivery via new bio-inspired, multisensory smartphone interfaces, (2) to use these basic results to develop a prototype route-map tool for conveying combined turn-by-turn route information and map overviews, and (3) to evaluate the prototype tool for supporting spatial learning, navigation, and usability through rigorous, inclusive user studies. Research findings will provide new insight about theories of multisensory spatial information processing in both blind and sighted humans. Project outcomes will also contribute to development of much-needed multisensory design guidelines specifying the best information/modality pairings supporting information-access, spatial learning, and navigation for BVI people across the spectrum of visual status. Technical advancements from the project will lead to development of a new software framework for implementing these guidelines in optimized multisensory interfaces that will simplify future design of accessible BVI navigation technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.