Haptic-based cognitive mapping to support shopping malls exploration

This paper describes a study, which is currently underway, whose aim is to investigate how the haptic channel can be effectively exploited by visually impaired users in a mobile app for the preliminary exploration of an indoor environment, namely a shopping mall. Our goal was to use haptics to convey knowledge of how the points of interest (POIs) are distributed within the physical space, and at the same time provide information about the function of each POI, so that users can get a perception of how functional areas are distributed in the environment "at a glance". Shopping malls are typical indoor environments in which orientation aids are highly appreciated by customers, and many different functional areas persist. We identified seven typical categories of POIs which can be encountered in a mall, and then associated a different vibration pattern each. In order to validate our approach, we designed and developed a prototype for preliminary testing, based on the Android platform. The prototype was periodically debugged with the aid of two visually impaired experienced users, who gave us precious advice throughout the development process. We will describe how this app was conceived, the issues emerged during its development and the positive outcomes produced by a very early testing stage. Finally, we will show that the proposed approach is promising and is worthy of further investigation.