| Popis: |
Vision loss is among the major causes of disability. It is estimated that over 285 million peopleworldwide are visually impaired, with 39 million considered blind and 246 million having lowvision. To reduce the burden of disease and increase the quality of life for this group, numerousinitiatives are currently under way to aid with the rehabilitation of blind and vision-impaired people.One of the means in which people have attempted to supply visual information to blind people isthrough the use of sensory substitution devices (SSDs). The core concept of an SSD is takinginformation normally gained through one sensory modality (e.g. sight) and replacing it withinformation normally gathered through a different sensory modality (e.g. touch, or sound). For thisthesis a custom visual to tactile SSD was developed with improved spatial and temporal resolutioncompared to a commonly used device. Chapter 2 includes the development of our tactile SSD and initial tests of the spatial andtemporal resolution using two different resolutions. Increased performance in the high-resolutionconditions was found for sensitivity, and motion detection/discrimination but not for objectdiscrimination tasks. In Chapter 3, object localisation and level of distracting information was testedacross tasks that included increasing amounts of cue information. We found that localisation abilityremained consistent regardless of the increase in information presented with the device. Overall the results of my thesis suggest that our custom-built device performs similar toexisting devices in object localisation and discrimination tasks but performed at its best in tasksinvolving motion stimuli. Critically the studies presented here support the continuation of increasedspatial and temporal resolution in SSDs and suggest that we are still not reaching the full potentialof what can be achieved with this technology. |
