B5-Navigation systems for the blind

Global Positioning System

Loadstone GPS
Wayfinder Access
Trekker
BrailleNote GPS
Historical or research projects
Trinetra
MoBIC
Drishti
Brunel navigation system for the blind
NOPPA

Loadstone GPS

The Loadstone project is developing an open source software for satellite navigation for blind
and visually impaired users. The software is free and runs currently on many different Nokia
devices with the S60 platform under all versions of the Symbian operating system. A GPS
receiver must be connected to the cell phone by Bluetooth. A lot of blind people around the
world are using Nokia cell phones because there are two screen reader products for the S60
Symbian platform; Talks from Nuance Communications and Mobile Speak from the Spanish
company Code Factory, which make these devices accessible by output of synthetic speech
and also allow the use of third party software like Loadstone GPS.

The Loadstone developers themselves are blind and are from Vancouver, Glasgow and
Amsterdam. Many users from around the world participate with improvement proposals
Because they know exactly what functionality helps best to increase their pedestrian mobility.
In 2004 the project was started by the private individuals Monty Lilburn and Shawn
Kirkpatrick and after first development successes they made it public in May 2006 and other
volunteers found their way to this project of global selfhelp. The program is under the GNU
General Public License (GPL), and was financed only by the private developers and by
donations of users. It makes blind people more independent of the trading policy and prices of
the few global vendors of accessible satellite navigation solutions.

Since for large rural regions of our world or developing or newly industrializing countries
nearly no exactly map data is available in common map databases, the Loadstone software
provides users an option to create and store own waypoints for navigation and share it with
others. The Loadstone community is working on import of coordinates from free sources like
the OpenStreetMap project as well. In addition they are searching for a sponsor of licenses for
commercial map data like the company Tele Atlas offers. . The other major supplier is
NAVTEQ which will be taken over by Nokia soon.

Loadstone is the name of a natural magnetic iron which was used for a long time in history for
manufacturing of compasses.
Sighted owners of S60 devices can use Loadstone for the leisure-time activity geocaching.
Wayfinder Access

Wayfinder Access is an innovative GPS solution from the Swedish company Wayfinder
Systems AB. This application for Symbian phones is designed especially to work with screen
readers like Mobile Speak or Talks from Nuance Communications and text-to-speech
technology, and takes into consideration the special needs of the blind and visually impaired.
With Symbian screen reader software, however, you get more than just the reading of the
application’s screens, but also a Braille support.

Highlights of Wayfinder Access include, but are not limited to:

• Information provided for both pedestrian and vehicular navigation.

• A database of 20 million points of interest.
• Online maps that are regularly updated.
• The "Where am I?" feature that readily gives information about your current location.
• The "What is in my surrounding?" feature that initiates a scan of the immediate area to
inform you of street names , intersections and nearby points of interest such as
restaurants, banks, and much more.
• The new “Vicinity View” feature that allows you to hear audible references for an area
with a scope that you can later adjust based on the radius of the scanned vicinity.
• Feedback on points of Interest (POI), crossings or favorites that can be restricted,
prioritized, and presented according to their distance from your location.

Trekker

The Victor Trekker, designed and manufactured by HumanWare (previously known as

VisuAide), was launched on March 2003. It is a personal digital assistant (PDA) application
operating on a Pocket PC, adapted for the blind and visually impaired with talking menus,
talking maps and GPS information. Fully portable (weight 600g), it offered features enabling
a blind person to determine position, create routes and receive information on navigating to a
destination. It also provided search functions for an exhaustive database of point of interests,
such as restaurants, hotels, etc.

It is fully upgradeable, so it can expand to accommodate new hardware platforms and more
detailed geographic information.

Trekker and Maestro, which is the first off-the-shelf accessible PDA based on Windows
Mobile Pocket PC, are integrated and available since May 2005.

BrailleNote GPS

The BrailleNote GPS device is developed by Sendero Group, LLC, and Pulse Data
International, now called HumanWare, in 2002. It is like a combination of a personal digital
assistant, Map-quest software and a mechanical voice.
With a receiver about the size of a small cell phone, the BrailleNote GPS utilizes the GPS
network to pinpoint a traveler’s position on earth and nearby points of interest. The personal
computers receive radio signals from satellites to chart the location of users and direct them to
their destination with recorded voice commands. The system uses satellites to triangulate the
carrier’s position, much like a ship finding its location at sea.

Visually impaired people can encode points of interest such as local restaurants or any other
location, into the computer’s database. Afterward, they can punch keys on the unit’s keyboard
to direct themselves to a specific point of interest.

Historical or research projects

Trinetra

The Trinetra project aims to develop cost-effective, independence-enhancing technologies to

benefit blind people. One such system addresses accessibility concerns of blind people using
public transportation systems. Using GPS receivers and staggered Infrared sensors,
information is relayed to a centralized fleet management server via a cellular modem. Blind
people, using common text-to-speech enabled cell phones can query estimated time of arrival,
locality, and current bus capacity using a web browser.

Trinetra, spearheaded by Professor Priya Narasimhan, is an ongoing project at the Electrical

and Computer Engineering department of Carnegie Mellon University. Additional research
topics include item-level UPC and RFID identification while grocery shopping and indoor
navigation in retail settings.

MoBIC

MoBIC means Mobility of Blind and Elderly people Interacting with Computers, which was
carried out from 1994 to 1996 supported by the Commission of the European Union. It was
developing a route planning system which is designed to allow a blind person access to
information from many sources such as bus and train timetables as well as electronic maps of
the locality. The planning system helps blind people to study and plan their routes in advance,
indoors.

With the addition of devices to give the precise current position and orientation of the blind
pedestrian, the system could then be used outdoors. The outdoor positioning system is based
on signals and satellites which give the longitude and latitude to within a metre; the computer
converts this data to a position on an electronic map of locality. The output from the system is
in the form of spoken messages.

Drishti

Drishti is a wireless pedestrian navigation system. It integrates several technologies including

wearable computers, voice recognition and synthesis, wireless networks, Geographic
information system (GIS) and GPS. It augments contextual information to the visually
impaired and computed optimized routes based on user preference, temporal constraints (e.g.
traffic congestion), and dynamic obstacles (e.g. ongoing ground work, road blockade for
special events).
The system constantly guides the blind user to navigate based on static and dynamic data.
Environmental conditions and landmark information queries from a spatial database along
their route are provided on the fly through detailed explanatory voice cues. The system also
provides capability for the user to add intelligence, as perceived by the blind user, to the
central server hosting the spatial database.

Brunel navigation system for the blind

Prof. W. Balachandran is the pioneer and the head of GPS research group at Brunel
University. He and his research team are pursuing research on navigation system for blind and
visually impaired people. The system is based on the integration of state of the art current
technologies, including high-accuracy GPS positioning, GIS, electronic compass and wireless
digital video transmission (remote vision) facility with an accuracy of 3~4m. It provides an
automated guidance using the information from daily updated digital map datasets e.g.
roadworks. If required the remote guidance of visually impaired pedestrians by a sighted
human guide using the information from the digital map and from the remote video image
provides flexibility.

The difficulties encountered includes the availability of up to date information and what
information to offer including the navigation protocol. Levels of functionality have been
created to tailor the information to the user’s requirements.

NOPPA

NOPPA navigation and guidance system was designed to offer public transport passenger and
route information using GPS technology for the visually impaired. This was a three-year
(2002~2004) project in VTT Industrial Systems in Finland. The system provides an unbroken
trip chain for a pedestrian using buses, commuter trains and trams in three neighbor cities’
area. It is based on an information server concept, which has user-centered and task oriented
approach for solving information needs of special needs groups.

In the system, the Information Server is an interpreter between the user and Internet
information systems. It collects, filters and integrates information from different sources and
delivers results to the user. The server handles speech recognition and functions requiring
either heavy calculations or data transfer. The data transfer between the server and the client
is minimized. The user terminal holds speech synthesis and most of route guidance.

NOPPA is currently able to offer basic route planning and navigation services in Finland. In
practice, the limits are map data can have outdated information or inaccuracies, positioning
can be unavailable or inaccurate, or wireless data transmission is not always available

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_for_the_visually_impaired