Indoor Navigation for People With Visual Impairment in Canada: Participatory Co-Design and Interdisciplinary Study of the Edge A-Eye Platform.
Soutongnoma Safiata Kaboré, Deborah Annan, Prajjol Raj Puri and 9 others
Thirteen adults with visual impairment completed eight indoor navigation tasks in a clinic; success ranged from 31% (finding an examination room) to 100% (exiting the building).
Users prioritized door-level guidance, voice control, and privacy. The platform is still in development.
Key findings
1Task completion varied widely across eight sequential navigation tasks in a simulated optometry visit: 4 of 13 (31%) found the examination room independently, while all 13 (100%) exited the building successfully. In the waiting area, 54% preferred human help over technology.
2Users and rehabilitation specialists ranked door-level guidance, voice or haptic hands-free control, and strict privacy controls (opt-out, data minimization, face blurring) as the top requirements for an indoor navigation platform.
3The Edge A-Eye platform is at Technology Readiness Level 7-8 (real-world evaluation ongoing as of September 2025) and is not yet a finished, deployable product.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Thirteen people completed the real-world tasks, all at a single rehabilitation centre in Montreal, so the findings may not generalize to other settings or populations. The platform is still in development (TRL 7-8); the task performance data reflects a prototype, not a finished product, and features were still changing during testing. Participants were required to be semi-independent travellers with at least one year of smartphone use and no cognitive disability, so the results say nothing about people with more complex needs. The study documents a design process rather than testing whether the platform improves navigation compared to no technology or to existing aids. Device compatibility was limited (Android only during testing; iPhone support was still desired), which restricts who could actually use the platform.
Declared interests
Funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (grant IT37317) with industry financial support from VMWare by Broadcom, Inc. The funder had no involvement in the study's design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing. No conflicts of interest were declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 100% exit success or the 85% waiting-area success as evidence that this navigation platform is ready to recommend to a patient. The platform is still at TRL 7-8 (real-world evaluation ongoing), the examination-room task had only 31% independent success, and the study documents a co-design process rather than testing the platform against a control or against existing aids such as a white cane or guide dog.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →