In this article, the authors present secure and safe mobility network (SeSaMoNet), a navigation and environment description system for users with visual impairments. The system is designed with attention to usability and accessibility features and for its great scalability. The spread of mobile technology such as handheld devices and related software, personal digital assistants and smartphones, wireless communication, text-tospeech, databases and finally radio frequency identification made it possible for the authors to build a portable, easy to use orientation and navigation aid that still has a great development margin. A double version, Symbian and Windows Mobile, allows quite every type of user equipment to be supported. The system aims to provide a nonintrusive and accessible way to expand the experiences of people with visual impairments and provide them with useful information about the environment beyond the tactile probing of the closest surroundings. This article expands previous work, detailing the usability and accessibility issues the authors faced and the new features introduced in the last period.
In this paper a technologic aid for visually impaired people based on passive low-frequency RFID transponders and its evolution from the first implementation is presented. The system evolution process mainly concerns the adoption of different electronic solutions that took place during the last years in order to produce an independent, fully functional, safe and secure navigation system for blind people. The solid technological bases on which the system relays on make it ready for a wide use among the visually impaired people in their everyday life. New implementations of the system, designed in order to reach a wider potential users community, are presented at the end of the article.
The Project's objective is the development of an integrated system to increase mobility of people with disabilities and their personal safety and security, by identifying a secure path to walk through selected areas, particularly for people with visual disability. This is done through the use of mature and proven technologies (RFID, antennas, bluetooth, etc.) which only have to be integrated for this specific application.The system is based on 3 main components: a path made of transponders, a custom-designed walking cane and a smart phone. Each RFID tag is associated to a message or a small beep. The system describes the environment and warns the user if there is a potential danger such as a road crossing or a step.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.