Blind walkers can navigate indoors with a phone in their pocket

• 06 Apr 2024

People with eye problems are restricted in movement. They have difficulties walking along the streets and visiting public places, including stores, shopping malls, and railway stations.

 

To help people with limited mobility and improve quality of their lives, many companies implement into their infrastructure innovation technologies, such as indoor navigation for the visually impaired and the blind.

 

Researchers at the University of California have created two prototype wayfinding apps to help such people.

 

What is Wayfinding Software?

Unlike traditional signage-based wayfinding, wayfinding software uses algorithms to calculate routes between waypoints or points of interest and overlays those routes on interactive, indoor maps. These maps can be embedded into web or mobile applications, and on their own, are sufficient for enabling indoor wayfinding.

 

A pair of smartphone apps can guide people who are blind through unfamiliar buildings, even if their handset is tucked away in a pocket. The researchers behind the technology say its crucial advantage is that the tools require no costly infrastructure to be added to buildings.

 

Roberto Manduchi and his colleagues created two experimental smartphone apps. These are built-in motion sensors in the phone and work with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). If the motion sensors sense the way, the AI ​​records the movements as it moves around the building.

 

By playing it back, it provides the necessary cues to get out of the building easily. These apps have already been tested on some people. Most of the results were good.

 

Hence the researchers hope to introduce it to the outside world soon. They do not emit light beams like other similar systems that aid in navigation. There is no need for building owners to install new hardware. They can just upload the building maps.

 

So there is no need to spend money additionally. You might be wondering who will upload the photos of all the buildings. The researchers also created an online tool for the people to upload maps of their buildings to automate this process in the forthcoming days.