eLabrador: A Wearable Navigation System for Visually Impaired Individuals

Visually impaired individuals encounter significant challenges when walking and acting in unfamiliar environments, particularly in outdoor scenarios. The complexity of outdoor environments, characterized by diverse obstacles, traffic signals, and societal norms, poses substantial barriers to mobility of visually impaired individuals and makes long-distance walking especially arduous. Although GPS-based navigation systems can facilitate long-distance travel, they often suffer from location inaccuracies in urban areas and even completely fail indoors. Moreover, these systems lack the capability to provide detailed information about walkways and immediate surroundings, which are crucial for safe and efficient walking. To address these limitations, we introduce a proof-of-concept wearable navigation system named eLabrador, designed to assist visually impaired individuals in long-distance walking in unfamiliar outdoor environments. The eLabrador integrates public maps (e.g. Amap or Google Maps) and GPS for global route planning, while leveraging computational visual perception to provide precise and safe local guidance. This hybrid approach enables accurate and safe navigation for visually impaired individuals in outdoor scenarios. Specifically, the eLabrador utilizes a head-mounted RGB-D camera to capture environmental geometric terrain and objects in outdoor urban environments. These inputs are processed into a 3D semantic map, offering a detailed representation of the surrounding environment. The planning module then integrates this 3D semantic map with route information from the global map (i.e. Amap) to generate an optimized walking path. Finally, the interaction module utilizes the audio-haptic dual-channel to relay navigation instructions to visually impaired user. Together, these three modules work seamlessly to facilitate long-distance navigation for visually impaired individuals in outdoor environments. The eLabrador is evaluated with two real-world outdoor scenarios, involving 10 visually impaired and visually masked participants. The experiments show that eLabrador successfully guides visually impaired participants to their destinations in outdoor environments. Additionally, the eLabrador provides descriptive information about landmarks and other navigation cues, helping visually impaired users better understand their surroundings. Subjective evaluations further indicate that most participants felt a sense of safety and reported an acceptable cognitive load during navigation, indicating its usability and effectiveness. Note to Practitioners—Visually impaired individuals almost cannot walk long distance in unfamiliar outdoor environments. Without proper assistance, their mobility and quality of life can be severely impacted. To address this issue, this article presents a wearable navigation system eLabrador to assist visually impaired individuals in walking outdoors, such as traveling from a residential entrance to a nearby park. Experimental results from real-world scenarios involving 10 participants demonstrate that eLabrador safely guides visually impaired users to their destination, significantly enhancing their mobility and independence.