Indoor navigation map for visually impaired people

Abstract

Due to recent progress of geospatial and mobile technologies, it becomes available to provide geospatial information services to visually impaired people such as BlindSquare. In this demo paper, we present a prototype of voice indoor routing map service, called VIM(Voice-based Indoor Maps) for visually impaired people. This prototype service has been designed for navigation along braille blocks between two points in indoor space and developed by using TalkBack user-interface of Android OS. The voice navigation information is mainly based on an OGC standard [3], IndoorGML [2], which serves as the framework data model and XML schema to describe the network connectivity in indoor space. The data model of VIM is designed by considering several safety requirements for visually impaired people. The prototype service has been implemented and tested on a real site of subway station in Seoul.