A Haptic Glove as a Tactile-Vision Sensory Substitution for Wayfinding

A prototype of a device that relays navigational information to a person who is visually impaired using a portable tactile glove and a wearable computer and camera system was demonstrated and tested. The results of preliminary tests using the glove as a navigational device show that the paths traversed by subjects negotiating an obstacle course using the glove were not qualitatively different from the paths produced with existing wayfinding devices and that hitting probabilities, the measure of the likelihood of hitting an obstacle, are minimized from goal-directed random walks.