Navigation can be a problem for anyone from time to time. Whether it is trying to find one’s way in an unfamiliar town or in the country, in a complex office building, or a hospital, airport or museum. Increasingly, we need to navigate through virtual environments as well as real ones. For people with disabilities and older people, these situations can be particularly challenging. This in turn means that disabled and older people may miss opportunities for work and leisure, are less independent and have poorer quality of life overall.
Technologies have provided exceptional advances in relation to navigation for everyone, from GPS guidance and digital maps to beacon-based audio guides in museums. These developments have also been very important to disabled people, for example providing pedestrian navigation systems for visually disabled people. Other technologies have support people with physical disabilities, for example power wheelchairs with autonomous navigation and exoskeletons for mobility. However, many gaps remain and new technologies are constantly emerging which might be put to use to help older and disabled people in navigation.
Papers in this Special Thematic Session (STS) may address but are not limited to:
- Better understand the needs of particular user groups in relation to indoor and outdoor navigation or navigation in virtual environments
- Challenges of existing navigational solutions for particular user groups
- navigation of particular types of locations such as airports or museums
- navigation in relation to public transport
- route planning and understanding and using maps, both physical and digital
- navigating with autonomous vehicles for particular user groups
- training for navigation in both the real and virtual worlds
- use of AR and VR in supporting navigation by particular user groups
- methodological and ethical issues in research on this topic
Chairs
Helen Petrie, University of York
Gerhard Weber, Dresden University of Technology