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The impact of the sensory augmentation device "feelSpace belt" on spatial orientation and navigation of blind people

Spatial orientation and navigation require cognitive skills, but most of all depend primarily on vision. Blind, visually impaired and deaf-blind people do not have this fast source of information about their environment available. To facilitate and enhance orientation and navigation and to make travelling outdoors safer for people deprived of visual input, the “feelSpace belt” can be used. The belt gives its wearer information about the magnetic north via vibrotactile stimulation around the waist. The aim of this study is to investigate to what extent the belt has an impact on the orientation and navigation abilities of blind people. Congenitally blind and late-blind subjects wore the belt for seven weeks in everyday situations and five of them additionally took part in behavioural experiments. Two deaf blind subjects wore the belt for three to four weeks. The experimental tasks took place before and in the middle of the participants’ training period. They consisted of a straight-line walking task to evaluate the belt’s effect on blind people trying to keep to the direction in which they are heading, an angular rotation task to examine the development of the egocentric orientation capabilities of the participants and a triangle completion navigation task to test whether the belt helps to take shortcuts. Weekly questionnaires gave an insight into the subjective experiences and evaluations of the participants. Overall, the belt’s information on cardinal directions proved to have intuitively a positive effect on the participants, facilitating especially orientation but also navigation. The results suggest that egocentric route based navigation, which has been shown in previous studies to be the favoured navigation strategy of blind people, was still preferred when the participants wore the belt but, due to the belt, was further extended by increased use of also the allocentric reference frame.