APPLYING SPATIAL ABILITY ASSESSMENTS TO A PERSONALIZED
NAVIGATION ASSISTANT
1 -
2 -
fickas@cs.uoregon.edu
This paper hypothesizes that a
navigation-assistance system (e.g., OnStar™) that is personalized to a single
user’s goals, abilities, needs and preferences, can lead to better results than
a non-personalized generic version. An experiment is proposed that uses
individual performance on spatial ability tests as the basis for
personalization. Each subject will be assessed on their “map rotation”
abilities. Previous research shows that
map rotation is a task involved in navigational map reading. When traveling in a direction (other than a
straight line on a map) a person is faced with the rotation task and must
choose between one of two strategies: physically rotate the map or mentally
rotate the map geometry and accompanying text.
Literature also documents the effects of rotation angle on a person’s
ability to effectively complete the rotation task. Therefore, map rotation may not be measured
in only binary terms (i.e. people can or can not rotate maps), but measured along
a continuum, where different people are affected by different angles/rotation
thresholds.
Our PNA is part of an ongoing project that
supports pedestrian travel in a city environment. In particular, the SmartBag system has been developed in the Wearable Computing Lab at
the
The study proposed here is the first in a series of interest. Beyond map rotation, other personalization points can be taken from spatial abilities including visual memory and self-location abilities. We hypothesize, based on previous research, that each of these have the potential to personalize a navigation system to the greatest benefit to an individual.