Tactile & Inertial Patterns from a Long White Cane

People who are blind usually understand their environment via a long cane with the cutaneous (tactile), kinesthetic and auditory modalities. We are currently interested in only how obstacle location is solely conveyed via tactile and kinesthetic information. Our objective is to gain insight into how we can encode scene information obtained from cameras and range finders in only tactile form. In our experiment, the tactile and inertial patterns from a long white cane, the cutaneous sense and the kinesthetic sense associated with the use of long cane, were measured in terms of force and inertial measurements. Inertial events were found to be highly correlated with tactile events. We conclude that the vibratory signal is only an artifact of the kinesthetic (inertial) information obtained by active use of the long cane and plan to further explore auditory environmental discrimination abilities to provide the necessary insight for our desired tactile encoding