BlindeDroid: An Information Tracking System for Real-time Guiding of Blind People

Among the activities affected by visual impairment, navigation plays a fundamental role, since it enables the person to independently move in safety. The heterogeneous environment, easily perceived by visually enabled people, is hardly known by partially sighted people. A challenging task for these people is independent navigation in new spaces/buildings/environments.The environment is usually signaled and labeled with visual marks and signs which are not appropriate for blind persons. With the purpose of balancing the access to services and spaces among all persons, this work proposes an innovative navigation and information system to help the navigation of blind people within new environments (e.g. shopping center, public office building). Based on smartphones and wireless sensors deployed in the environment, we propose an information tracking system for realtime guide blind people (BlindeDroid). It offers guided navigation, answering questions, and providing objective information about places, products and services that are available surrounding the user.