Using Portable Virtual Reality to Assess Mobility of Blind and Low-Vision Individuals With the Audomni Sensory Supplementation Feedback

Abstract

Numerous electronic travel aids (ETAs) to increase the mobility of blind or low-vision (BLV) individuals have been proposed. However, the lack of established and well-motivated methods, and of recruiting enough BLV test participants, keeps a successful aid illusory. To combat this, a new aid-agnostic questionnaire focused on mobility, the Desire of Use Questionnaire for Mobility of BLV individuals (DoUQ-MoB) and a new portable, large-scale-exploration virtual reality (VR) system, the Parrot-VR, were employed to evaluate the ETA Audomni. Through VR and Audomni, 19 heterogenous BLV participants traversed large-scale urban environments. Their experiences were probed through the DoUQ-MoB, and their movement analyzed. Numerous results are presented, a highlight being that most participants, 76 %, responded that it was very or extremely likely that they would want to use Audomni along with their current aid. Further, Parrot-VR assists in recruiting a satisfying number of diverse BLV participants; and DoUQ-MoB allows to systematically probe their opinions of an aid, and how it relates to others aids, in a considerable quantity of mobility aid aspects. This work illuminates some shortcomings of Audomni, but also shows a majority of BLV participants actually wanting to use a proposed ETA — a result rarely seen so distinctly in the field, and which encourages the continuing efforts of the project. The results are supported by a novel test procedure, which might serve as future inspiration to the field.

Keywords

• Blindness
• electronic travel aids
• low vision
• mobility aids
• patient-reported outcome measures
• sensory substitution