Boarding Support of Public Bus for the Visually Impaired Using Location Services

Abstract

We propose a system targeting visually impaired individuals that provides a couple of functions that help when they claim they are always in trouble when going out using public transportation. One of the functions alerts users when the bus that they are planning to ride gets closer to the bus stop where they are waiting for the bus. It runs as a multi-thread system. One of the threads periodically obtains the location of the bus driver utilizing a GPS receiver and uploads it to a specific shared location on the web. The other thread fetches the stored shared location from the web and calculates the distance to the location of the bus stop where the user is waiting for the bus. The latter thread alerts the user when the distance gets lower than a threshold. The other function we propose alerts users when their intended bus stop is approaching within a certain distance during bus rides. The system utilizes the GPS functionality embedded in smartphones to acquire the user's latitude and longitude. By comparing this information with the coordinates preregistered in the system for each bus stop, it detects when the user reaches within a certain distance of the destination bus stop. The implementation of the proposed system demonstrated the intended functionality in an experiment.