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

HCC：中：为视力障碍人士提供包容性室内导航的多感官地图

• 批准号: 2312402
• 负责人: Nicholas Giudice
• 金额: $ 112.62万
• 依托单位: University of Maine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2026-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2312402&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: HCC; Medium; Multisensory; maps; inclusive

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.

该项目解决了日常生活中最基本，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之一。该项目的目标是将联合收割机可访问的路线和地图信息结合到一个首个统一的多传感器路线地图导航系统中，以提高BVI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局限性：（1）由于依赖于孤立地使用语音或触摸的单模式接口，导致对导航关键信息的访问不足（而不是采用环境信息的多模式通道来最大化可学习性和冗余）和（2）专注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，但室内空间缺乏无障碍导航工具）。所提出的专注于室内环境的系统将产生重大而直接的社会影响，因为它可以被实施以支持与工作、教育（大学校园）、医疗设施或任何必须安全有效地导航作为日常生活一部分的室内环境相关的复杂建筑物的学习和导航。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的指导方针将迎来一个新的时代，多用途，多感官无障碍导航系统的发展，包容性的设计，目前缺乏在无障碍导航technology.The无障碍导航工具的设计和评估在这个项目将结合联合收割机的多感官人类信息处理和创新的多模式界面设计的新理论，在一个包容性和多用途的系统。该项目有三个主要目标：（1）确定支持BVI个人室内导航所需的最佳信息访问要求，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）使用这些基本结果开发一个原型路线地图工具，用于传递组合的逐向路线信息和地图概览，以及（3）通过严格的、包容性的用户研究来评估支持空间学习、导航和可用性的原型工具。研究结果将为盲人和有视力的人的多感觉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/模态配对，支持BVI人在视觉状态范围内的信息访问，空间学习和导航。该项目的技术进步将导致开发一个新的软件框架，用于在优化的多感官界面中实施这些指导方针，这将简化未来无障碍BVI导航技术的设计。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。