Mobile Indoor Navigation Assistance for Mobility Impaired People

Mobility impaired people are often confronted with barriers along their chosen routes which lead to unreachable destinations and frustration. In order to assist this user group with finding barrier-free outdoor and indoor routes, we have developed a mobile application for Android devices which computes barrier-free routes between two locations on the basis of a personal profile. During our research, we tried to find other options to locate the user inside of a building, returning precise positions which can be calculated in real time without a high computing power and additional hardware. The starting position of a route is computed by using Bluetooth 4.0 transmitters which send UUIDs which was adapted by including the geo location of the transmitter into them. This allows us to compute the exact position of the user by trilateration of the signal strength of each transmitter. The ending point of the route is individually chosen by the user and is also returned as a geo location. Because we are using geo locations in decimal format, the results of our calculations can be displayed on every digital geographical map. The main difference to other solutions is, that we don’t use a special coordinate system for every building, instead we use the geolocations, which represent the coordinate system of the world and therefore, our developed technology can generally support a wide range of projects in the field of navigation. In addition, the result of our calculation can be displayed on every digital geographical map and is easily calculable to other widely used standards like WGS84, the common standard for current navigation devices. Instead of using special coordinate systems for every building, we use the geolocations, which represent the coordinate system of the entire world. That way, we are not only independent of additional coordinate information, but our navigation assistance works indoors as well as outdoors, as outdoor routing is based on the same geoid data. This makes our approach useable for a wide area of interests. This paper presents an innovative way to track users anywhere on our planet - even if they are inside of buildings - without using satellite communication for the determination of the position.