Abstract
Notably valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs. In this work, we build upon the experience from the BlindHelper smartphone outdoor pedestrian navigation app and present Blind MuseumTourer, a system for indoor interactive autonomous navigation for blind and visually impaired persons and groups (e.g., pupils), which has primarily addressed blind or visually impaired (BVI) accessibility and self-guided tours in museums. A pilot prototype has been developed and is currently under evaluation at the Tactual Museum with the collaboration of the Lighthouse for the Blind of Greece. This paper describes the functionality of the application and evaluates candidate indoor location determination technologies, such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and surface-mounted assistive tactile route indications combined with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons and inertial dead-reckoning functionality, to come up with a reliable and highly accurate indoor positioning system adopting the latter solution. The developed concepts, including map matching, a key concept for indoor navigation, apply in a similar way to other indoor guidance use cases involving complex indoor places, such as in hospitals, shopping malls, airports, train stations, public and municipality buildings, office buildings, university buildings, hotel resorts, passenger ships, etc. The presented Android application is effectively a Blind IndoorGuide system for accurate and reliable blind indoor navigation.
Highlights
Valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs
The implementation of a simpler and still-reliable wireless local area network (WLAN)-based system should be feasible considering other parameters such as predetermined, transparent to the public, linear tactile indicators mounted on the floor for blind or visually impaired person (BVI), user step counting, positioning information from proximity sensors installed in the indoor space at exhibits, entrances/exits, columns and other guidance spots
This paper presented the case study of an innovative approach to a smartphone-based indoor navigation system for people who are blind or visually impaired, in places of high interest to the world’s intellectual community
Summary
Valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs. Daily routine, which is trivial for most of us, is a real survival problem for groups of people with special needs and abilities, especially in a society with the bad habit of pushing such people to the side. Subsequent pilots will follow up with the National Archaeological Museum [4], the largest archaeological museum in Greece, with more than 11,000 exhibits, providing a panorama of Greek civilization from the beginnings of Prehistory to Late Antiquity, and the Acropolis Museum [5], focused on the findings of the archaeological site of the Acropolis of Athens, exhibiting nearly 4000 objects over an area of 14,000 square meters Both museums are interested in integrating interdisciplinary research in personalization and adaptivity, digital storytelling, interaction methodologies, and narrative-oriented mobile and mixed reality technologies [6]. Both BlindHelper, renamed Blind RouteVision and MuseumTourer, state-of-the-art navigation applications for BVI, and other IndoorGuides to come (see Section 6), comprise the MANTO. It concludes with a preliminary system validation through blindfolded sighted user tests and a valuable discussion regarding key concerns in blind indoor navigation, outlining the strengths of the presented solution
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
