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Updated: Jun 17, 2026
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Published on: March 27, 2013
Wayfinding and navigation approaches supporting mobility for people who are blind or visually Impaired: a scoping
Yue Qin1, Yutong Zhang1, Nihal Desai1
1University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
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Purpose: Independent mobility is crucial to the daily lives of the growing population of people who are blind or visually impaired (PBVI). Despite the rapid growth of research on assistive approaches for PBVI mobility, the limitations and challenges identified through empirical evaluations have not yet been sufficiently synthesised.
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Materials and methods: This paper presents a scoping review of 50 studies to examine how assistive approaches supporting PBVI wayfinding and navigation have been empirically evaluated and to conduct a thematic analysis of the limitations and challenges reported in prior work. For the purposes of this review, we use wayfinding and navigation as analytic labels: wayfinding refers primarily to activities related to route planning and environmental understanding, whereas navigation refers primarily to activities related to real-time movement during travel.
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Results: The review identified four recurring themes concerning the physical appearance of devices, the performance of hardware and software, the quality of interaction with users, and integration into daily life. More specifically, we summarised critical questions that highlight the aspects in which existing assistive approaches fall short compared to the expectations of users. Based on the identified themes and implications across the reviewed studies, we further developed a practical checklist of considerations to support future design and evaluation.
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Conclusion: Our findings reveal important gaps in current evaluation practices and unmet user needs, while also providing actionable guidance for the future design and assessment of assistive approaches for PBVI mobility. Implications for rehabilitationAssistive approaches for PBVI mobility should be selected, introduced, and evaluated according to whether they support route planning and environmental learning, real-time movement, or both.Rehabilitation practice should move beyond whether an assistive approach improves task performance and consider whether it can be learned, trusted, personalized, combined with existing mobility aids, and integrated into users' everyday travel routines.
