An Examination of Obstacle Avoidance by Sound for Visually Impaired Children

In this paper, our research group examines obstacle avoidance by sound to support visually impaired children, because it is estimated that there are 1.4 million visually impaired children in the world. For that reason, we have developed a walking training device for these children. This paper demonstrates obstacle avoidance by sound as an elemental technology of the device. An obstacle transmission element outputs different sounds depending on the position of the obstacle. In particular, the element calculates the distance from the child to the obstacle by values from another elemental technology. After that, the element selects a sound using the distance and obstacle coordinates, and outputs the sound. For an evaluation of the elemental technology, we conducted an evaluation experiment to confirm that the sound correctly corresponds with the distance to the obstacle. As a result, we confirmed that the device could calculate distance and output different sounds correctly.