ASSISTIVE PEDESTRIAN AUDIO LOOP FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED

The work presented here is an investigation of the use of Assistive Pedestrian Audio Loops (APAL) at street intersections to assist visually impaired pedestrians. The loop works with hearing aids, loop receivers, or smart phones with telecoil to provide awareness including advance warnings at traffic intersections in form of audio or speech. Intersection traffic light, camera, and microphone signals are converted into audio or speech and transmitted via the audio loops to the hearing aids, loop receivers, or smart phones telecoil to assist the visually impaired pedestrians. Two types of APAL are discussed in this work. The first type is a perimeter loop encircling the entire intersection and using one single driver to provide environment awareness and lights status for all crossing directions. This type of perimeter loop is less expensive and easy to implement but less effective in helping pedestrians because it fails to locate their actual position. The second type of loop system uses four separate loops and loop-drivers at a four-way intersection to provide accurate lights status for all crossing directions from the location of the pedestrian. The information in this case can be customized for each corner of the intersection. Additional cancellation loops are required to reduce interference between the loops. The analysis and simulations of the current loop show that Assistive Pedestrian Audio Loops can be effectively used to assist visually impaired pedestrians.