Smartphone Based Indoor Navigation for Blind Persons using User Profile and Simplified Building Information Model

Abstract

the ability of moving from one place to another place is an important activity of human's daily life. This activity is easily performed by the sighted people, however blind people are greatly affect due to the visual impairment. Navigation is the crucial activity for blind people, they can only travel in fixed route that are needed to their lives. This situation makes great difficulty for the blind people in their work and lives etc. The blind people are an important inevitable part of our community who has equal rights to utilize the resources of the world. Current navigation solutions for blind people increases cognitive load to memorize a large number of POI (Point of Interests), which significantly affect their performance and lead frustration. It is accepted that inability of moving independently can stop the participation of a person into society. Like other disabilities, blindness influences one's quality and mobility of life particularly when the vision is lost at the stage of adulthood after having functional vision. To make this blind community an active part of society, we present a smartphone-based approach for solving blind people's navigation issues in indoor environments that completely utilize the processing and sensory technologies of smartphone instead of relying on external technologies. The need to create indoor navigation application arises due to inaccessibility of GPS technology in indoor environments.