An Assistive Indoor Navigation System for the Visually Impaired in Multi-Floor Environments

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Pablo Munoz ◽  
Bing Li ◽  
Xuejian Rong ◽  
Jizhong Xiao ◽  
Yingli Tian ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Navigation System ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Indoor Navigation System

scholarly journals Deep Learning-Based Positioning of Visually Impaired People in Indoor Environments

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (21) ◽  
pp. 6238
Author(s):  
Payal Mahida ◽  
Seyed Shahrestani ◽  
Hon Cheung
Keyword(s):  
Navigation System ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Indoor Environment ◽  
Inertial Sensor ◽  
User Interaction ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Indoor Environments ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Indoor Navigation System

Wayfinding and navigation can present substantial challenges to visually impaired (VI) people. Some of the significant aspects of these challenges arise from the difficulty of knowing the location of a moving person with enough accuracy. Positioning and localization in indoor environments require unique solutions. Furthermore, positioning is one of the critical aspects of any navigation system that can assist a VI person with their independent movement. The other essential features of a typical indoor navigation system include pathfinding, obstacle avoidance, and capabilities for user interaction. This work focuses on the positioning of a VI person with enough precision for their use in indoor navigation. We aim to achieve this by utilizing only the capabilities of a typical smartphone. More specifically, our proposed approach is based on the use of the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer of a smartphone. We consider the indoor environment to be divided into microcells, with the vertex of each microcell being assigned two-dimensional local coordinates. A regression-based analysis is used to train a multilayer perceptron neural network to map the inertial sensor measurements to the coordinates of the vertex of the microcell corresponding to the position of the smartphone. In order to test our proposed solution, we used IPIN2016, a publicly-available multivariate dataset that divides the indoor environment into cells tagged with the inertial sensor data of a smartphone, in order to generate the training and validating sets. Our experiments show that our proposed approach can achieve a remarkable prediction accuracy of more than 94%, with a 0.65 m positioning error.

scholarly journals Developing an Ultra Wideband Indoor Navigation System for Visually Impaired People

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 6152342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Alnafessah ◽  
Mai Al-Ammar ◽  
Suheer Al-Hadhrami ◽  
Abdulmalik Al-Salman ◽  
Hend Al-Khalifa
Keyword(s):  
Navigation System ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Ultra Wideband ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Indoor Navigation System

scholarly journals PERCEPT Indoor Navigation System for the Blind and Visually Impaired: Architecture and Experimentation

2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aura Ganz ◽  
James Schafer ◽  
Siddhesh Gandhi ◽  
Elaine Puleo ◽  
Carole Wilson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Navigation System ◽  
Independent Living ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Healthcare Facilities ◽  
Blind And Visually Impaired ◽  
Multistory Building ◽  
Indoor Navigation System ◽  
System Effectiveness

We introduce PERCEPT system, an indoor navigation system for the blind and visually impaired. PERCEPT will improve the quality of life and health of the visually impaired community by enabling independent living. Using PERCEPT, blind users will have independent access to public health facilities such as clinics, hospitals, and wellness centers. Access to healthcare facilities is crucial for this population due to the multiple health conditions that they face such as diabetes and its complications. PERCEPT system trials with 24 blind and visually impaired users in a multistory building show PERCEPT system effectiveness in providing appropriate navigation instructions to these users. The uniqueness of our system is that it is affordable and that its design follows orientation and mobility principles. We hope that PERCEPT will become a standard deployed in all indoor public spaces, especially in healthcare and wellness facilities.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document