Wearable Haptic Displays Design for Visual Impaired Football

Abstract

Visual impairment causes many inconveniences in people’s everyday activities such as traveling, socializing, or exercising. For those who are blind, maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle is exceedingly difficult. For instance, it is extremely challenging to participate in team sports such as basketball or football without visually locating the ball or the other players. For players with visual impairments to locate the ball with audio feedback during football matches, a customized ball equipped with sound devices is now required. Such settings, however, necessitate extremely silent settings and are challenging to implement for training or regular play. In this research, we suggest a wearable haptic display and interface design to improve football players with visual impairments’ target and player location tasks. We describe the haptic feedback design for players’ ball tracking and the system architecture facilitated by Internet of Things technology.