[guide.chat] helping you when you go outside
- From: vanessa <qwerty1234567a@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "GUIDE CHAT" <guide.chat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 2 Sep 2012 02:36:03 +0100
GPS for the visually impaired
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Loadstone project is developing an open source software for satellite
navigation for blind and visually impaired users. The software is free and runs
currently on many different Nokia devices with the S60 platform under all
versions of the Symbian operating system. A GPS receiver must be connected to
the cell phone by Bluetooth. Many blind people around the world are using Nokia
cell phones because there are two screen reader products for the S60 Symbian
platform; Talks from Nuance Communications and Mobile Speak from the Spanish
company Code Factory. This makes these devices accessible by output of
synthetic speech and also allow the use of third party software, such as
Loadstone GPS.
The Loadstone developers, who are blind, are from Vancouver, Glasgow, and
Amsterdam. Many users from around the world have contributed improvement
proposals as they know exactly what functionality helps to increase their
pedestrian mobility. Monty Lilburn and Shawn Kirkpatrick started the project in
2004. After the first development successes, they made it public in May 2006.
Since then, other volunteers have found their way to this project of global
self-help. The program is under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and was
financed entirely by the private developers and by donations of users. This
product provides blind people with more independence from the trading policy
and prices of the few global vendors of accessible satellite navigation
solutions.
In large rural regions and developing, or newly industrializing, countries
nearly no exact map data is available in common map databases. As such, the
Loadstone software provides users an option to create and store their own
waypoints for navigation and share it with others. The Loadstone community is
working on importing coordinates from free sources, such as the OpenStreetMap
project. In addition they are searching for a sponsor of licenses for
commercial map data, such as is offered by the company Tele Atlas. The other
major supplier is Navteq, which belongs to Nokia.
Loadstone is the name of a natural magnetic iron that was used throughout
history in the manufacturing of compasses.
Sighted owners of S60 devices can use Loadstone for leisure-time activities
geocaching.
[edit]Wayfinder Access
Wayfinder Access was a GPS solution from the Swedish company Wayfinder Systems
AB. This application for Symbian phones was designed especially to work with
screen readers, such as Mobile Speak from Code Factory or TALKS from Nuance
Communications and offers text-to-speech technology. It is able to take the
special needs of the blind and visually impaired into consideration. Symbian
screen reader software offers more than just the reading of the application?s
screens, but also supports Braille devices.
Highlights of Wayfinder Access include, but are not limited to:
Information provided for both pedestrian and vehicular navigation.
A database of 20 million points of interest.
Online maps that are regularly updated.
The "Where am I?" feature that readily gives information about your current
location.
The "What is in my surrounding?" feature that initiates a scan of the immediate
area to inform you of street names, intersections and nearby points of interest
such as restaurants, banks, and much more.
The new ?Vicinity View? feature that allows you to hear audible references for
an area with a scope that you can later adjust based on the radius of the
scanned vicinity.
Feedback on points of Interest (POI), crossings or favorites that can be
restricted, prioritized, and presented according to their distance from your
location.
The Wayfinder Access Service has been shut down in 2011 after the company has
been overtaken by Vodafone.
[edit]Trekker
The Victor Trekker, designed and manufactured by HumanWare (previously known as
VisuAide), was launched on March 2003. It is a personal digital assistant (PDA)
application operating on a Dell Axim 50/51 or later replaced by HP IPAQ 2490B
Pocket PC, adapted for the blind and visually impaired with talking menus,
talking maps, and GPS information. Fully portable (weight 600g), it offered
features enabling a blind person to determine position, create routes and
receive information on navigating to a destination. It also provided search
functions for an exhaustive database of point of interests, such as
restaurants, hotels, etc.
The PDA's touch screen is made accessible by a tactile keypad with buttons that
is held in place with an elastic strap.
It is fully upgradeable, so it can expand to accommodate new hardware platforms
and more detailed geographic information.
Trekker and Maestro, which is the first off-the-shelf accessible PDA based on
Windows Mobile Pocket PC, are integrated and available since May 2005.
The Trekker is no longer sold by Humanware; the successor "Trekker Breeze" is a
standalone unit. The software has fewer features than the original Trekker.
[edit]Trekker Breeze
The Trekker Breeze is standalone hardware. Routes need to be recorded before
they can be used. POIs are supported.
[edit]BrailleNote GPS
The BrailleNote GPS device is developed by Sendero Group, LLC, and Pulse Data
International, now called HumanWare, in 2002. It is like a combination of a
personal digital assistant, Map-quest software and a mechanical voice.
With a receiver about the size of a small cell phone, the BrailleNote GPS
utilizes the GPS network to pinpoint a traveler?s position on earth and nearby
points of interest. The BrailleNote receives radio signals from satellites to
chart the location of users and direct them to their destination with spoken
information from the speech synthesizer. The system uses satellites to
triangulate the carrier?s position, much like a ship finding its location at
sea.
Users can record points of interest such as local restaurants or any other
location into the PDA?s database. Afterward, they can use keyboard commands on
the unit?s keyboard to direct themselves to a specific point of interest.
[edit]Mobile Geo
Mobile Geo is Code Factory?s GPS navigation software for Windows Mobile-based
Smartphones, Pocket PC phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Powered
by GPS and mapping technology from the Sendero Group, a leading provider of GPS
products for the blind, Mobile Geo is the first solution specifically designed
to serve as a navigation aid for people with a visual impairment which works
with a wide range of mainstream mobile devices. Though it is a separately
licensed product, Mobile Geo is seamlessly integrated with Code Factory?s
popular screen readers ? Mobile Speak for Pocket PCs and Mobile Speak for
Windows Mobile Smartphones .
[edit]Navigation systems that are not designed for blind people, but are
accessible
[edit]Kapsys Kapten
The French company Kapsys offers a navigation system without a display, that
works with speech input and output, called Kapten.
It was originally developed for cyclists but became favourite in blind
communities soon because of its low price compared to other accessible
navigation solutions.
[edit]Historical or research projects
[edit]Trinetra
The Trinetra project aims to develop cost-effective, independence-enhancing
technologies to benefit blind people. One such system addresses accessibility
concerns of blind people using public transportation systems. Using GPS
receivers and staggered Infrared sensors, information is relayed to a
centralized fleet management server via a cellular modem. Blind people, using
common text-to-speech enabled cell phones can query estimated time of arrival,
locality, and current bus capacity using a web browser.
Trinetra, spearheaded by Professor Priya Narasimhan, is an ongoing project at
the Electrical and Computer Engineering department of Carnegie Mellon
University. Additional research topics include item-level UPC and RFID
identification while grocery shopping and indoor navigation in retail settings.
[edit]MoBIC
MoBIC means Mobility of Blind and Elderly people Interacting with Computers,
which was carried out from 1994 to 1996 supported by the Commission of the
European Union. It was developing a route planning system which is designed to
allow a blind person access to information from many sources such as bus and
train timetables as well as electronic maps of the locality. The planning
system helps blind people to study and plan their routes in advance, indoors.
With the addition of devices to give the precise current position and
orientation of the blind pedestrian, the system could then be used outdoors.
The outdoor positioning system is based on signals and satellites which give
the longitude and latitude to within a metre; the computer converts this data
to a position on an electronic map of locality. The output from the system is
in the form of spoken messages.
[edit]Drishti
Drishti is a wireless pedestrian navigation system. It integrates several
technologies including wearable computers, voice recognition and synthesis,
wireless networks, Geographic information system (GIS) and GPS. It augments
contextual information to the visually impaired and computed optimized routes
based on user preference, temporal constraints (e.g. traffic congestion), and
dynamic obstacles (e.g. ongoing ground work, road blockade for special events).
The system constantly guides the blind user to navigate based on static and
dynamic data. Environmental conditions and landmark information queries from a
spatial database along their route are provided on the fly through detailed
explanatory voice cues. The system also provides capability for the user to add
intelligence, as perceived by the blind user, to the central server hosting the
spatial database.
[edit]UCSB Personal Guidance System
In 1985, Jack Loomis, a Professor of Psychology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, came up with the idea of GPS-based navigation system
for the visually impaired. A short unpublished paper (Loomis, 1985) outlined
the concept and detailed some ideas for implementation, including the idea of a
virtual sound interface. Loomis directed the project for over 20 years, in
collaboration with Reginald Golledge (1937?2009), Professor of Geography at
UCSB, and Roberta Klatzky, Professor of Psychology (now at Carnegie Mellon
University). Their combination of development and applied research was
supported by three multi-year grants from the National Eye Institute (NEI) and
another multi-year consortium grant from the National Institute on Disability
and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), headed by Michael May of Sendero Group. In
1993, the UCSB group first publicly demonstrated the Personal Guidance System
(PGS) using a bulky prototype carried in a backpack. Since then, they created
several versions of the PGS, one of which was carried in a small pack worn at
the waist. Their project mostly focused on the user interface and the resulting
research has defined the legacy of the project. As indicated earlier in this
entry, several wearable systems are now commercially available. These systems
provide verbal guidance and environmental information via speech and Braille
displays. But just as drivers and pilots want pictorial information from their
navigation systems, survey research by the UCSB group has shown that visually
impaired people often want direct perceptual information about the environment.
Most of their R&D has dealt with several types of ?spatial display?, with
researchers Jim Marston and Nicholas Giudice contributing to the recent
efforts. The first is a virtual acoustic display, which provides auditory
information to the user via earphones (as proposed in the 1985 concept paper).
With this display, the user hears important environmental locations, such as
turn points along the route and points of interest. The labels of these
locations are converted to synthetic speech and then displayed using auditory
direction and distance cues, such that the spoken labels appear in the auditory
space of the user. A second type of display, which the group calls a ?haptic
pointer interface?, was inspired by the hand-held receiver used in the Talking
Signs© system of remote signage. The user holds a small wand, to which are
attached an electronic compass and a small loudspeaker or vibrator. When the
hand is pointing toward some location represented in the computer database, the
user hears a tone or feels a vibration. Supplementary verbal information can be
provided by synthetic speech. The user moves toward the desired location by
aligning the body with the hand while maintaining the "on-course" auditory or
vibratory signal. Other variants of the pointer interface involve putting the
compass on the body or head and turning the body or head until the on-course
signal is perceived. Six published route-guidance studies indicate that spatial
displays provide effective route guidance, entail less cognitive load than
speech interfaces, and are generally preferred by visually impaired users.
[edit]Brunel navigation system for the blind
Prof. W. Balachandran is the pioneer and the head of GPS research group at
Brunel University. He and his research team are pursuing research on navigation
system for blind and visually impaired people. The system is based on the
integration of state of the art current technologies, including high-accuracy
GPS positioning, GIS, electronic compass and wireless digital video
transmission (remote vision) facility with an accuracy of 3~4m. It provides an
automated guidance using the information from daily updated digital map
datasets e.g. roadworks. If required the remote guidance of visually impaired
pedestrians by a sighted human guide using the information from the digital map
and from the remote video image provides flexibility.
The difficulties encountered includes the availability of up to date
information and what information to offer including the navigation protocol.
Levels of functionality have been created to tailor the information to the
user?s requirements.
[edit]NOPPA
NOPPA navigation and guidance system was designed to offer public transport
passenger and route information using GPS technology for the visually impaired.
This was a three-year (2002~2004) project in VTT Industrial Systems in Finland.
The system provides an unbroken trip chain for a pedestrian using buses,
commuter trains and trams in three neighbor cities? area. It is based on an
information server concept, which has user-centered and task oriented approach
for solving information needs of special needs groups.
In the system, the Information Server is an interpreter between the user and
Internet information systems. It collects, filters and integrates information
from different sources and delivers results to the user. The server handles
speech recognition and functions requiring either heavy calculations or data
transfer. The data transfer between the server and the client is minimized. The
user terminal holds speech synthesis and most of route guidance.
NOPPA is currently able to offer basic route planning and navigation services
in Finland. In practice, the limits are map data can have outdated information
or inaccuracies, positioning can be unavailable or inaccurate, or wireless data
transmission is not always available.
[edit]Navig
NAVIG is an innovative multidisciplinary project, with fundamental and applied
aspects. The main objective is to increase the autonomy of blind people in
their navigation capabilities. Reaching a destination while avoiding obstacles
is one of the most difficult issue that blind individuals have to face.
Achieving autonomous navigation will be pursued indoor and outdoor, in known
and unknown environments. The project consortium is composed by two research
centers in computer sciences specialized in human-machine interaction (IRIT)
for handicapped people and in auditory perception, spatial cognition, sound
design and augmented reality (LIMSI). Another research center is specialized in
human and computer vision (CERCO), and two industrial partners are active in
artificial vision (Spikenet Technology) and in pedestrian geolocalisation
(Navocap). The last member of the consortium is an educational research center
for the visually impaired (CESDV ? IJA, Institute of Blind Youth).
[edit]TANIA
TANIA is a project founded at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. The
hardware is based on GPS and RFID. It allows navigation for blind and deafblind
persons with step accuracy. It only works where special maps have been created
for the system.
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