Towards a Situation Awareness Design to Improve Visually Impaired Orientation in Unfamiliar Buildings: Requirements Elicitation Study

Abstract NRequirement s elicitation can be a challenging process in many systems. This challenge can be greater with a non-standard user population , such as visually impaired users. In this work, we report our experience and results of eliciting user requirements for a situation awareness indoor orientation system dedicated to the visually impaired. We elicited our initial system requirement s through three different studies that focus on users along with orientation and mobility instruc tors. Also , we perform ed a knowledge elicitation through our studies to formulate our systemOs situation awareness requirements. support userOs decisions. Second, SA design helps in deciding Index Terms NVisual impairment , requirement s elicitation, situation awareness requirements, assistive technology , and qualitativ e analysis . I. I NTRODUCTION The World Health O rganization (WHO) estimated that there are currently 285 million people who have a visual impairment [4]. Visually impaired (VI) persons can be either legally or totally blind. Legally blind means having the visual acuity of 20/200 in the better eye due to a vision problem that cannot be corrected, a limited vision field, or a visual disorder [3]. While sighted people rely on their vision to understand and orient themselves in unfamiliar indoor environments, VI persons rely on their other senses to underst and such environments . This reliance, however, causes many challenges that this class of users faces. For instance, VI users might get distracted and veer from their path in any unfamiliar , noisy indoor environment. VI challenges in the unfamiliar buildings motivate us to develop an assistive orientation technology that helps to raise their environmental situation awareness of unfamiliar indoor en vironments, and therefore accommodate userOs orientation. Situation awareness (SA) is known as the Othe perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future O [16]. Due to the scope of this paper, we will not discuss the SA design. Orientation is Othe ability to use oneOs remaining senses to understand oneOs location in the environment at any given time [1].O Visually impaired users face man y orientation challenges when they enter unfamiliar indoor environments. Tasks, like for example, realizing the surround ing important landmarks , can be difficult in unknown environments as users try to pickup cues and comprehend them to build their mental model. A mental model is a cognitive term that refers to the phenomenon of having an imaginary mental image that depends on a personOs knowledge and experiences [7]. The SA design approach was selected for this work for two reasons. First, the SA design a pproach is useful for systems that what and when to present information to the user s, while maintaining an acceptable information flow that allow s the users to comprehend presented infor mation [5]. The VI need to be able to focus on the environment while using our system. Requirements elicitation with a non -standard population poses many challe nges as software engineers need to understand the problem domain. With VI users, many challenges are pr esented such as the absence of visual aid s to discuss user Os needs. In this study, we discussed our work with two different stakeholder populations to elicit and define initial requirements for a n SA orientation assistive technology to enhance VI orientation in unfamiliar indoor environments. The system goal is to enhance VI user Os performance in unfamiliar indoor environments by providing them with an assistive technology that helps in raising their SA of the surrounding environment. To elicit the system requirements we performed a series of three requirement elicitation studies: domain understanding, orientation and mobility (O&M) recommendations , and survey -based studies. O&M is defined as teaching VI persons th e required skills to be able to travel safely and efficiently in any environment [2]. Eliciting O&M instructorsO knowledge is very important for our design as they can provide recommended guidelines that help in enhancing VI userOs mobility and safety when orienting in unfamiliar indoor environments. Our elicitation studiesO goal is to realize user Os problems and to elicit initial user and SA requirements. Our contribution in this paper can be summarized as conduction of the SA requirement sO elicitation and analysis of VI usersO orientation in unfamiliar indoor environments . Our results can help other researchers who are conducting further