Dynamic indoor navigation and orientation system for people with impairments

Abstract

Assistive technologies play an important role on the way to an inclusive society. At this point, mobile indoor navigation for persons with impairments is a task far from being solved.

Existing studies mainly focus on outdoor navigation, are closed source and closed data or are aimed at one single target group only, and consequently represent isolated solutions.

Therefore, this study reports a design for an indoor navigation system for persons with different impairments, following the idea of open source and open data to facilitate a long-term and sustainable solution everyone can contribute to. The proposed system components are discussed, which include novel indoor mapping methodologies, user profile-specific indoor extensions for routing, navigation instructions and rendering, as well as an accurate technology for indoor positioning.

Both modularity of the proposed system as well as the design-for-all approach allow, for the first time, the general application of mobile navigation addressing a variety of impairments.