Indoor navigation system for blind and visually impaired people

Abstract

The urban mobility is a challenging task for blind and visually impaired people. Even there are some mobile phone application supporting their mobility, but they are mostly focusing on outdoor environment. The important aspects of the navigation challenges are navigation inside a railway station, shopping mall and generally navigation in indoor environment, inside buildings. However, there is no widely available and standardized localization technology exist for indoor environment which is similar to the outdoor GPS based general solution. The situation with the digitalized maps is similar, there are several outdoor digital maps are available, but the indoor digital mapping solution just emerging nowadays. Therefore, our goal is to design and develop a mobile phone application for indoor localization and navigation, of course considering the special requirements of blind and visually impaired users. We believe this application might provide significant help for its users in indoor environment.