Design and development of a navigation assistance system for visually impaired individuals

In this paper, the design of a navigation assistance system for the visually impaired is discussed, and the development of such a prototype system is presented. The motivation of this research is to develop a navigation system without the necessity of continuous user localization. Navigational information is only provided when necessary at decision-making locations. Absolute spatial information is stored for these locations, and ZigBee technology is applied for wireless data communication between the location node and the user module. Infrared, computer vision, and inertial technologies are applied in the system to transform the absolute spatial information into user-centric destination orientation data.