Methodologies and evaluation of electronic travel aids for the visually impaired people: A review

Abstract

Technological advancements have widely contributed to navigation aids. However, their large-scale adaptation for navigation solutions for visually impaired people haven’t been realized yet. Less participation of the visually impaired subject produces a designer-oriented navigation system which overshadows consumer necessity. The outcome results in trust and safety issues, hindering the navigation aids from really contribute to the safety of the targeted end user. This study categorizes electronic travel aids (ETAs) based on experimental evaluations, highlights the designer-centred development of navigation aids with insufficient participation of the visual impaired community. First the research breaks down the methodologies to achieve navigation, followed by categorization of the test and experimentation done to evaluate the systems and ranks it by maturity order. From 70 selected research articles, 51.4% accounts for simulation evaluation, 24.3% involve blindfolded-sighted humans, 22.9% involve visually impaired people and only 1.4% makes it into production and commercialization. Our systematic review offers a bird’s eye view on ETA development and evaluation and contributes to construction of navigational aids which really impact the target group of visually impaired people.