A Navigation Method for Visually Impaired People: Easy to Imagine the Structure of the Stairs

People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) face many problems when they enter unfamiliar areas by themselves. To address this problem, we aim to enable people with VIB to walk alone, even in unfamiliar areas. We propose a navigation method that enables people with VIB to imagine structures such as staircases easily and thus move safely when walking alone even in unfamiliar areas. An experiment is conducted with six participants with VIB walking up or down stairs with four different structures in an indoor environment. Its results verify that the proposed method could provide appropriate amounts of guidance messages and convey the messages in a safer manner than the existing method.