Twinkle megane: Near-eye LED indicators on glasses in tele-guidance for elderly

The development of wearable technologies has generated significant interest in the last decades. Considering global social issues such as aged society besides the technologies, senior citizens suffering from memory loss would be one of potential user groups. Since the use of eyeglasses among the elderly is quite common, we have constructed a navigation interface on eyeglasses by implanting a set of light emitting diode indicators on the frame of the glasses. We aim to realize eyeglasses-based navigation system that provides the elderly with the visual cues and could be interpreted intuitively as navigational commands. Furthermore, we believe that our system would improve the independent mobility of the elderly. This paper explains our first prototype glasses with near-eye LED indicators, incremental experimentation, and the preliminary results that are used to optimize the visual cues for real navigational tasks. The system was evaluated in simulated navigational tasks by the elderly participants suffering from dementia. We assessed our system by he experimentation and living lab methodology with data-driven approach.