How do We Aid Visually Impaired People Safely Manage Unfamiliar Environments?

It is a challenge for researchers and engineers in the assistive technology (AT) community to provide suitable solutions for visually impaired people (VIPs) for orientation, navigation and mobility (ONM). Our literature review looked at the current state of the art in AT designed to aid VIPs in ONM. Given the spectrum of the AT solutions at the time of our survey, there are several papers in our review which raise the adoptability issue for AT solutions specifically designed for VIPs. We conducted a survey in order to gain insight into how this technology was actually being used by VIPs. We consider the underlying issues and challenges causing current AT solutions to fall short in addressing VIP's ONM needs. We felt that it is critical to re-examine and rethink the approaches that have been taken. It is our belief that we need to take a different and innovative approach to solve this problem while addressing the issues revealed in our survey and subsequent analysis. Motivated by these findings, we propose an integrated cyber-physical system (CPS) framework with 'Agents' and 'Smart Environments' to address VIP's ONM needs in urban settings.