Assisting mobility of the disabled using space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure

Abstract

In achieving the mobility assistance for the individuals with different disabilities, it is required to recognize places with different granularities defined based on human interest, which is hard to be accomplished using traditional GPS-based approaches. In order to meet this requirement, a space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure designed upon the concept of the universal design has been proposed, which is capable of constructing a service that is aware of places of human interest using ubiquitous computing technologies. Upon this infrastructure, two case studies are performed in the existing civil space, consisting of a pedestrian navigation service for the individuals with different needs, and a mobility assistant service for the visually-impaired. Through these case studies, the possibilities of the proposed infrastructure are discussed.

Identifying Most Walkable Direction for Navigation in an Outdoor Environment

“…Previous work in HCI community use crowd-sourcing [5] or direct sensing devices -such as RFID tags [58], ultrasonic sensors [4], and mobile phone sensors [8,19,38] - 1 Source code is available at: https://github.com/ sacmehta/MSRSegNet to assist the blind. However, these approaches do not work in unconstrained outdoor environments.…”

“…Our input-aware residual connection first identifies the relevant high-frequency components between an input image and the encoded feature map (using a sign function) and then suppresses the low-frequency components from the encoded feature map using multiplicative gating. The resultant map is then used to refine the decoded feature map 4 . IARC can be mathematically defined as:…”

“…The most widely used mobility aid, white canes, rely on contact with obstacles, as a source of feedback and therefore, pose collision risks. To address these risks, systems that use sensing devices, such as ultrasonic transducers [58], RFID tags [4], and cameras [2,33,35,53] have been proposed. These systems have proven to be robust and accurate for indoor navigation.…”

Blindness Electronic Assistant System

“…Related works study a number of indoor and outdoor navigation and way finding techniques for visually impaired persons. [4]Whereas outdoor systems rely upon GPS to locate the user's location [5,6], indoor systems typically rely upon physical augmentation of the environment such as infrared (IR) [7,8], ultrasound [9], or radio frequency identifier (RFID) tags [10,11,12] or expensive sensing equipment such as the systems based on computer vision [13]. Shows that the paper presenting a portable device that contains an ultrasound distance sensor which sends ultrasound signal and receive its echo, Developing tool kit is used for signal processing, conversion and then activate a vocal signal and vibration motor to be accessible to blind people indicating the distance and the direction of obstacles as a compensatory way instead of vision.…”