Intuitive Environmental Perception Assistance for Blind Amputees Using Spatial Audio Rendering

Vision and touch are essential sensory systems for human to interact with the environment. For the blind amputees, how to quickly and intuitively convey the environmental information to them is one of the key issues for recovering their daily living ability. Inspired by the auditory localization ability of human, we constructed a virtual scene almost identical to reality, and concurrently added a virtual sound source to the interactive object. Leveraging the method of spatial audio rendering (SAR), the three-dimensional motion of the virtual sound source can be vividly simulated in real-time. Finally, a myoelectric prosthetic control system was developed to assist blind amputees in their daily activities, The Fitts' law test on target localization was conducted on both SAR and voice prompt (VP) based path guidance methods, the results indicate that SAR significantly improves the information transfer rate. The results of prosthetic control test show that SAR reduces the completion time by half than the VP, while restoring the natural grasping path. With the advantage of intuitive and rich perception, the SAR demonstrated the potential applications for blind amputees to reconstruct the control and sensory loops.