CityGuide: A Seamless Indoor-Outdoor Wayfinding System for People With Vision Impairments

Abstract

GPS accuracy is poor in indoor environments and around buildings. Thus, reading and following signs still remains the most common mechanism for providing and receiving wayfnding information in such spaces. This puts individuals who are blind or visually impaired (BVI) at a great disadvantage. This work designs, implements, and evaluates a wayfnding system and smartphone application called CityGuide that can be used by BVI individuals to navigate their surroundings beyond what is possible with just a GPS-based system. CityGuide enables an individual to query and get turn-by-turn shortest route directions from an indoor location to an outdoor location. CityGuide leverages recently developed indoor wayfnding solutions in conjunction with GPS signals to provide a seamless indoor-outdoor navigation and wayfnding system that guides a BVI individual to their desired destination through the shortest route. Evaluations of CityGuide with BVI human subjects navigating between an indoor starting point to an outdoor destination within an unfamiliar university campus scenario showed it to be effective in reducing end-to-end navigation times and distances of almost all participants.

Wayfinding Tools for People With Visual Impairments in Real-World Settings: A Literature Review of Recent Studies

“…One research team conducted one indoor only and one outdoor only (Bai et al, 2017). Only four studies included single routes which transitioned between indoor and outdoor settings (Ahmetovic et al, 2016;Ahmetovic et al, 2017;Cheraghi et al, 2019). Urban cityscapes, university campuses, basements of office complexes, supermarkets, retail stores, multi-level malls, airports, train stations, and community parks were contexts for the travel tasks.…”

Accessible wayfinding and navigation: a systematic mapping study

“…Considering the smartphone operating system, in the majority of the cases, the applications are developed to run on Android, taking advantages of the high diffusion and the affordability of Android devices (e.g., [16,29,88,119]). The Apple iOS architecture seems the best choice for applications focused on blind and visually impaired users, thanks to the advanced built-in accessibility features provided by Apple devices (e.g., [6,13,57,71,75]).…”

“…Indoor-outdoor intermodal navigation is considered in [15]; in this case, the problem is providing navigation instructions that guide the user in the transitions between indoor and outdoor environments and in the usage of public transportation. Similarly, CityGuide [29] is a system specifically designed to cope with indoor-outdoor intermodal navigation problems; it leverages indoor wayfinding solutions in conjunction with GPS signals, in order to provide users with turn-by-turn shortest route directions from an indoor location to an outdoor location.…”

It’s also about timing! When do pedestrians want to receive navigation instructions

“…Similarly, personal interests have been incorporated into salience models, in order to be exploited for choosing personalized landmarks (see Nuhn & Timpf, 2020). Moreover, a large branch of research is dedicated to adapting systems to users with special needs, such as mobility impaired people (see, e.g., Barhorst-Cates, Rand & Creem-Regehr, 2019;Cheraghi, Almadan & Namboodiri, 2019) or visually compromised persons (see, e.g., Ding et al, 2007;Völkel & Weber, 2008).…”