Keep Your Distance: A Playful Haptic Navigation Wearable for Individuals with Deafblindness

Deafblindness, a form of dual sensory impairment, significantly impacts communication, access to information and mobility. Independent navigation and wayfinding are main challenges faced by individuals living with combined hearing and visual impairments. We developed a haptic wearable that provides sensory substitution and navigational cues for users with deafblindness by conveying vibrotactile signals onto the body. Vibrotactile signals on the waist area convey directional and proximity information collected via a fisheye camera attached to the garment, while semantic information is provided with a tapping system on the shoulders. A playful scenario called “Keep Your Distance” was designed to test the navigation system: individuals with deafblindness were “secret agents” that needed to follow a “suspect”, but they should keep an optimal distance of 1.5 meters from the other person to win the game. Preliminary findings suggest that individuals with deafblindness enjoyed the experience and were generally able to follow the directional cues.