A personal sensory navigation profile for visually impaired people

The ability to navigate the world around us is fundamental to everyday life as it allows us to independently obtain our personal goals. Individuals with visual impairments often receive orientation and mobility training with the goal to improve navigating the world using their other senses, such as hearing and touch. Standardized and evidence-based guidelines on which type of sensory information and strategies lead to the best navigation performance in distinct types of visual impairments and for different individuals are lacking. The aim of the current project is to develop and validate a personalized sensory navigation profile questionnaire to identify idiosyncratic navigation strengths, weaknesses, and preferences for use in mobility training for a wide range of visually impaired individuals. This will be done by conducting qualitative, semi-structured interviews with visually impaired individuals and clinical professionals to collect input for the most important topics and constructs. The interview data will be analysed using thematic analysis, and used to develop the sensory navigation profile questionnaire. In later studies, data from the navigation profile questionnaire will be combined with behavioural data concerning individuals' actual navigational behaviour when using different senses. This presentation will provide an overview of the research protocol that is currently running as well as preliminary interview data from the first study in the protocol The findings from these studies will ultimately be of interest to people with visual impairments, clinical workers, and scientists that study navigation and sensory functions and can be implemented directly in orientation and mobility training.