2012 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
Reaching to Sound Accuracy in the Peri-personal Space of Blind and Sighted Humans
verfasst von : Marc J. -M. Macé, Florian Dramas, Christophe Jouffrais
Erschienen in: Computers Helping People with Special Needs
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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With the aim of designing an assistive device for the Blind, we compared the ability of blind and sighted subjects to accurately locate several types of sounds generated in the peri-personal space. Despite a putative lack of calibration of their auditory system with vision, blind subjects performed with a similar accuracy as sighted subjects. The average error was sufficiently low (10° in azimuth and 10 cm in distance) to orient a user towards a specific goal or to guide a hand grasping movement to a nearby object. Repeated white noise bursts of short duration induced better performance than continuous sounds of similar total duration. These types of sound could be advantageously used in an assistive device. They would provide indications about direction to follow or position of surrounding objects, with limited masking of environmental sounds, which are of primary importance for the Blind.