STIC - Sensory and Tactile Improved Cane

Navigation and obstacle avoidance, especially regarding head-level objects, are of major concern to visually impaired people. This paper describes the advances on the design of an augmented white cane, STIC (Sensory and Tactile ImprovedCane), making use of an ultrasonic distance sensor for head-level and a laser-based distance sensor for ground-level obstacle detection. The distance information is encoded viavibrotactile actuators. Additionally, a novel approach to re-tain obstacle information with the help of haptic after images is presented. Finally, the discriminability of distances based on the vibrotactile feedback was measured via a psychometric study. Objects shiftings by more than 13.58 cm yield a 90% detection accuracy.

@InProceedings\{HSFAS19,
  author       = "Hertel, Julia and Schaare, Armin and Feuerbach, Philipp and Ariza, Oscar and Steinicke, Frank",
  title        = "STIC - Sensory and Tactile Improved Cane",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the Mensch und Computer Conference 2019",
  pages        = "accepted",
  year         = "2019",
  url          = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2019/HSFAS19"
}