An Indoor Positioning and Navigation Application for Visually Impaired People using Public Transport

More than 3% of the world's population are visually impaired. An approach was taken to create an infrastructure-independent, smartphone-based navigation application, which can be used by visually impaired people to navigate in public transport systems. The presented method combines a timetable request and route planning in the public transport system with indoor positioning and navigation between different public transport vehicles. The approach is based on a graph-based pedestrian dead reckoning, which uses the existing tactile paths for positioning as well as guidance. The result of tests and a demonstration performed at a main railway station showed, that the smartphone application could deliver mean position residuals within a range of 5 to 6 m. Within this range, the guidance instructions provided were clear and useful, allowing visually impaired people to navigate between different vehicles and platforms.