Hacking Blind Navigation

Independent navigation in unfamiliar and complex environments is a major challenge for blind people. This challenge motivates a multi-disciplinary effort in the CHI community aimed at developing assistive technologies to support the orientation and mobility of blind people, including related disciplines such as accessible computing, cognitive sciences, computer vision, and ubiquitous computing. This workshop intends to bring these communities together to increase awareness on recent advances in blind navigation assistive technologies, benefit from diverse perspectives and expertises, discuss open research challenges, and explore avenues for multi-disciplinary collaborations. Interactions are fostered through a panel on Open Challenges and Avenues for Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Minute-Madness presentations, and a Hands-On Session where workshop participants can hack (design or prototype) new solutions to tackle open research challenges. An expected outcome is the emergence of new collaborations and research directions that can result in novel assistive technologies to support independent blind navigation

Smartphone application for accessible navigation

Διπλωματική εργασία--Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2018.The main aim of this study is to investigate how the modern smartphone technology can assist people with visual impairments in indoor navigation tasks. We use the free and open indoor navigation service Anyplace, to design an indoor guidance system that is accessible, inexpensive, simple and user-friendly to different user groups disregarding their disabilities. The Android application that Anyplace offers, was extended and modified to serve also the needs of visually impaired users. The presented system works well with the assistive applications that Android platform offers and provides various ways for interaction between the user and the system. The system is communicating with Anyplace server to inform the user about the information of the surrounding environment and guide him/her to the desired place in the building with accessible messages. The application can process, specific pre-defined user commands and location information from existing QR labels in the building. This thesis is focusing on assisting the impaired users on indoor navigation tasks, but not on replacing the assistive means that the visually impaired user is already using. (e.g. long cane, guide dog) Experimental results show the ability of the system to effectively communicate with the user and assist him/her in way-finding tasks in the building of the University of Macedonia

SmartWheels: Detecting urban features for wheelchair users’ navigation

People with mobility impairments have heterogeneous needs and abilities while moving in an urban environment and hence they require personalized navigation instructions. Providing these instructions requires the knowledge of urban features like curb ramps, steps or other obstacles along the way. Since these urban features are not available from maps and change in time, crowdsourcing this information from end-users is a scalable and promising solution. However, it is inconvenient for wheelchair users to input data while on the move. Hence, an automatic crowdsourcing mechanism is needed. In this contribution we present SmartWheels, a solution to detect urban features by analyzing inertial sensors data produced by wheelchair movements. Activity recognition techniques are used to process the sensors data stream. SmartWheels is evaluated on data collected from 17 real wheelchair users navigating in a controlled environment (10 users) and in-the-wild (7 users). Experimental results show that SmartWheels is a viable solution to detect urban features, in particular by applying specific strategies based on the confidence assigned to predictions by the classifier

Evolution of Indoor Positioning Technologies: A Survey

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) use sensors and communication technologies to locate objects in indoor environments. IPS are attracting scientific and enterprise interest because there is a big market opportunity for applying these technologies. There are many previous surveys on indoor positioning systems; however, most of them lack a solid classification scheme that would structurally map a wide field such as IPS, or omit several key technologies or have a limited perspective; finally, surveys rapidly become obsolete in an area as dynamic as IPS. The goal of this paper is to provide a technological perspective of indoor positioning systems, comprising a wide range of technologies and approaches. Further, we classify the existing approaches in a structure in order to guide the review and discussion of the different approaches. Finally, we present a comparison of indoor positioning approaches and present the evolution and trends that we foresee

Airport Accessibility and Navigation Assistance for People with Visual Impairments

People with visual impairments often have to rely on the assistance of sighted guides in airports, which prevents them from having an independent travel experience. In order to learn about their perspectives on current airport accessibility, we conducted two focus groups that discussed their needs and experiences in-depth, as well as the potential role of assistive technologies. We found that independent navigation is a main challenge and severely impacts their overall experience. As a result, we equipped an airport with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacon-based navigation system and performed a real-world study where users navigated routes relevant for their travel experience. We found that despite the challenging environment participants were able to complete their itinerary independently, presenting none to few navigation errors and reasonable timings. This study presents the first systematic evaluation posing BLE technology as a strong approach to increase the independence of visually impaired people in airports

“AccessBIM” - A Model of Environmental Characteristics for Vision Impaired Indoor Navigation and Way Finding

The complexity of modern indoor environments has made navigation difficult for individuals with vision impairment. Hence, this thesis presents the AccessBIM framework, which is an optimized database that’s facilitates generation of a real-time floor plan with path determination. The AccessBIM framework has the potential to play an integral role in improving the independence and quality of life for people with vision impairment whilst also decreasing the cost to the community related to caretakers