Beacon-based wayfinding for people with disabilities

Abstract

There are currently few options for navigational aids for people with disabilities, specially those who are the blind and visually impaired (BVI) in indoor spaces and around buildings. Indoor environments can be geographically large and intimidating such as grocery stores, airports, sports stadiums, large office buildings, and hotels. Thus, reading and following signs still remains the most common mechanism for providing and receiving wayfinding information in such spaces. Such indoor spaces can be difficult to navigate even for those without disabilities if they are disoriented due to unfamiliarity or other reasons. This dissertation presents a wayfinding system called Guide- Beacon that can be used by BVI individuals to navigate their surroundings beyond what is possible with just a GPS based system. The GuideBeacon system allows users equipped with smartphones to interact with Bluetooth-based beacons deployed strategically within the indoor space of interest to navigate their surroundings. A major challenge in deploying such beacon-based navigation systems is the need to employ a time and labor-expensive beacon planning process to identify potential beacon placement locations and arrive at a topological structure representing the indoor space. Thus, this work presents a technique called IBeaconMap for creating such topological structures to use with beacon-based navigation. Using GuideBeacon as the underlying layer, this dissertation additionally proposes an inclusive emergency evacuation system called SafeExit4All that empowers people with disabilities (in addition to the general population) to independently find a safe exit under emergency scenarios. Finally, this work describes an indoor-outdoor navigation system called CityGuide which leverages the GuideBeacon in conjunction with GPS signals to enable a BVI individual to query and get turn-by-turn shortest route directions from an indoor location to their desired destination outdoor.