Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Visual deficiency is the state of lacking visual perception because of physiological or neurological factors. Our motivation is derived by the fact people with visual deficiency may experience a number of difficulties in daily existence. Despite the fact that blind people can navigate effectively in a place where they usually move, e.g. their house, it may difficult for them to navigate in an unknown place, such as a museum. As per World Health Association (WHO, 2021), the key facts in regard to visual deficiency and vision debilitation:
- •
Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment or visual deficiency, of whom at least 1 billion have a vision impairment that might have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.
- •
This 1 billion people include those with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness due to unaddressed refractive error, as well as near vision impairment caused by unaddressed presbyopia.
- •
Globally, the leading causes of vision impairment are uncorrected refractive errors and cataracts.
- •
The majority of people with vision impairment are over the age of 50 years.
Visually impaired people are facing various difficulties even when they try to move inside their house, not mentioning the difficulties when they move outdoors. Technologies like Global Positioning System (GPS) can support visually impaired people to navigate outdoors but such technologies can not be used indoors. Without a doubt, there is an expanding interest for effective indoor navigation systems, request that essentially get from smart cities, robots and visually impaired people. Taking everything into account, the GPS is among the most widespread used technology. However, GPS operates with exceptional performance for outdoor localization, it cannot used for indoor navigation. Obviously, indoor navigation is vital for numerous applications involving people and robots. Two of the most widely recognized issues that emerge are a) the way that actual obstacles inside buildings can be recognized and avoided and b) and localization inside the buildings.
Various floors, rooms and obstacles inside every single indoor area can be considered a significant challenge for the implementation of an indoor navigation system.”. Also, the failure to utilize the GPS technology inside buildings makes indoor navigation more complicated, for reasons previously clarified above. Thus, numerous new researches have led to make indoor navigation more viable and productive by using other technologies like Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth and sensors technologies.
This research has been implemented in the context of GuideMe project (GuideMe, 2021). GuideMe project will develop a platform that gives direction and security to out-of-home travel for people with visual impairment. The system is built around a portable wearable device, that is capable of indoor localization with precision of 10 cm using UWB technology and without the need for GPS signal which is not available indoors. The wearable device chooses the direction of the person, get voice commands, and communicate through voice guidelines. It is also equipped for identifying errors and sending the probable updates.
The motivation of the paper is to improve two areas of public activity of the visually impaired people and general speaking people with special needs: comfort and security. In particular, with the utilization of proposed system, impaired people will feel more comfortable visiting public places like airports, shopping centers, stations, and so forth, as they will be guided by the system to arrive at their destination. Moreover, in the event of an emergency including both the users and the building, the system will inform the users regarding the emergency and will guiding them to the closest exit. A definitive objective is to expand the presence of the population with mobility or different issues in buildings by 20%.