Computer Science and Informatics School, Universidad de Costa Rica, San José 2060, Costa Rica.
Sensors (Basel). 2012;12(6):8236-58. doi: 10.3390/s120608236. Epub 2012 Jun 13.
Navigation in indoor environments is highly challenging for the severely visually impaired, particularly in spaces visited for the first time. Several solutions have been proposed to deal with this challenge. Although some of them have shown to be useful in real scenarios, they involve an important deployment effort or use artifacts that are not natural for blind users. This paper presents an indoor navigation system that was designed taking into consideration usability as the quality requirement to be maximized. This solution enables one to identify the position of a person and calculates the velocity and direction of his movements. Using this information, the system determines the user's trajectory, locates possible obstacles in that route, and offers navigation information to the user. The solution has been evaluated using two experimental scenarios. Although the results are still not enough to provide strong conclusions, they indicate that the system is suitable to guide visually impaired people through an unknown built environment.
室内环境中的导航对于视力严重受损的人来说极具挑战性,尤其是在首次访问的空间中。已经提出了几种解决方案来应对这一挑战。尽管其中一些在实际场景中已经证明是有用的,但它们涉及到重要的部署工作或使用对盲人用户来说不自然的人工制品。本文介绍了一个室内导航系统,该系统在设计时考虑了可用性作为要最大化的质量要求。该解决方案能够识别一个人的位置,并计算其运动的速度和方向。使用这些信息,系统确定用户的轨迹,定位该路线上可能存在的障碍物,并向用户提供导航信息。该解决方案已经使用两个实验场景进行了评估。尽管结果还不足以提供有力的结论,但它们表明该系统适合引导视障人士穿过未知的建筑环境。