Position locator devices (PLDs) for positioning and localisation. It can be categorised into three types of devices/aids:Įlectronic travel aids (ETAs) for mobility and displacement,Įlectronic orientation aids (EOAs) for orientation and bearings, and There is, therefore, a clear demand for assistive technologies.Īccording to (Dakopoulos & Bourbakis, 2010), navigation assistive technologies provides a form of visual substitution for the visually impaired. The authors queried the participants regarding their usage of smartphone-based assistive technologies and gathered that only 13% of the users do not use assistive navigation technologies. These reviews include those of assistive mobility aids for the visually impaired, where case studies are conducted by interviewing a selected group of visually impaired pedestrians across the United States. This, along with and other challenges faced in the mobility of the visually impaired is highlighted in (Williams, Hurst, & Kane, 2013), with extensive reviews and case studies. on wearable technologies and smartphones) are evidently designed and developed for the sighted pedestrian, with little or no regard for the visually impaired. This is especially true whereby automotive navigation systems, along with many mainstream and modern pedestrian navigation systems implemented (e.g. With the advent of ubiquitous mobile and wireless technologies, there is a growing demand for assistive technologies from the visually impaired community. Assistive technologies exist to alleviate the mobility challenges faced by visually impaired pedestrians by utilising modern electronic innovations to guide the visually impaired user. Pedestrians who are visually impaired face numerous challenges whenever they are required to step out of their dwellings to move to another location. Testing results showed that this navigation system is suitable for use for the visually impaired pedestrians and the pathfinding algorithms performed consistently according to our algorithm proposals. Uninformed pathfinding algorithms are implemented onto this system based on our previous study on the implementation suitability of uninformed searches. This approach allows the system to be accessible to the masses due to the ubiquity of smartphones today.

Users interact with the system through speech recognition and synthesis. This is a smartphone-based navigation system that leverages the new advancements of smartphone hardware to achieve large data handling and fast pathfinding.

This form of positioning aims to reduce the deployment cost and complexity of pure RFID array implementations.

AbstractThis chapter presents an indoor navigation solution for visually impaired pedestrians, which employs a combination of a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag array and dead-reckoning to achieve positioning and localisation.

Dead Reckoning by Michael W. Smart