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Iyad Abu Doush, Sawsan Alshatnawi, Abdel-Karim Al-Tamimi, Bushra Alhasan, Safaa Hamasha, ISAB: Integrated Indoor Navigation System for the Blind, Interacting with Computers, Volume 29, Issue 2, March 2017, Pages 181–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iww016
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Abstract
Generally, indoor navigation is considered as a challenging task, especially when people navigate through an unfamiliar place (e.g. a university or a mall). It is even a more challenging endeavor for the visually impaired and blind community. This paper presents an innovative approach to the precise indoor navigation challenge for the blind individuals using a multi-tier solution with the help of an intuitive smartphone interface. We utilize a set of different communication technologies (WiFi, Bluetooth and radio-frequency identification) to help users reach an object with high accuracy. As a proof of concept, we deploy a fully functional testbed and we evaluate our entire solution inside our university library by helping blind users find a specific book. Our results demonstrate the high accuracy of the proposed system to reach an object with accuracy up to 10 cm. The intuitive smartphone interface provides step-by-step navigation voice instructions of the least hazardous path for the blind users while minimizing the cognitive load on their short-term memory. In addition, we show that our iterative improvements on our smartphone's interface has improved the system's efficiency and its accuracy in reaching specific objects successfully.