Personal Guidance System Employing a Virtual Auditory Display

The task of traveling safely and efficiently through a city, town or campus, either on foot or by public transportation, is far more difficult for the visually-impaired traveler than for one who possesses normal vision. The two major tasks confronting the visually impaired traveler are (1) navigation (wayfinding) and (2) avoidance of obstacles along the route. Besides the long-cane, a number of electronic devices have been develtoped to assist in obstacle avoidance; in contrast, general-purpose navigation aids for the visually impaired, similar t:o those used in aircraft, have been considered infeasible because of a lack of a means of determining the traveler's location with sufficient accuracy (on the order of meters). Recently, however, the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) has radically changed the prospects for such a navigation system, for hand-held, relatively low-cost GPS receivers with adequate resolution are now becoming available. We are proposing a portable microcomputer-based personal guidance