VisionWay Accessibility
ConditionPersons With Visual Disabilities
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot applicable
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age18+
SponsorOhio State University
About this trial
The challenge of outdoor wayfinding, critical for People with Visual Impairments (PVI), consists in helping users safely walk to a pre-determined nearby destination. The main focus of existing solutions from research and industry is to leverage the user's smartphone to receive safe moving directions either from a remote operator or smart app. However, multiple paths may exist to connect users with their destination, each one with unique characteristics in terms of accessibility and safety. Unfortunately, little to no attention has been paid in helping PVI decide, before even starting to walk, which path to take based on their accessibility. Thus, a barrier identified is that the followed path may not be accessible because sidewalk features such as potholes, uncontrolled crossing, interrupted sidewalks, and objects are not known in advance. The investigators' goal is to develop a mobile live, local, outside map framework called VisionWay, customized for PVI-user as a wayfinding tool to analyze, before starting to walk, the accessibility of candidate paths and choose one to the destination.
Eligibility criteria
This trial does not accept healthy volunteersQualifiers
At least 18 years old
Able to provide informed consent
Vision worse than 20/200, encompassing PVI with severe and profound impairment as well as total blindness.
Disqualifiers
Conditions that prevent safe ambulation that include, but are not limited to, neuromuscular disorder, post-operative state (such as orthopedic surgeries or cardiac surgeries), balance issues, history of falls in the last 6 months, or at the discretion of the investigator.
Use of walker or wheelchair
Trial design
Design model
Single group
Treatments tested in this trial
walking path
BehavioralParticipants will be asked to walk a defined pathway through campus. From the preselected paths, the set and order will be randomized between participants.
Treatment groups
100 Participants
are divided into 1 treatment groupGroup A: Recorded walksExperimental treatment 1 intervention
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
PVI accessibility on sidewalks
Primary objectives are to collect prospective data in PVI groups to define which sidewalk features affect accessibility and how to design an accessibility model able to estimate accessibility. Twenty sidewalk (path) features were scored on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = not important, 5 = very important), and participants indicated the number of additional minutes they would be willing to walk to access a route containing each feature (5-point scale. 1 = up to one minute, to 5 = five or more minutes). A combined score for each feature was determined by summing the two values (for each feature) to generate an overall priority ranking. Higher scores indicate a greater perceived importance.
Time frame
For a period over 2 hoursSponsors and contacts
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Ohio State University
Lead sponsor
University of Maine
Collaborator
Source ClinicalTrials.gov