J. Eduardo Pérez
Masatomo Kobayashi
Hironobu Takagi
ABSTRACT
Despite the growing availability of location-based services (LBS) to support pedestrian activities, we know little about the effectiveness of existing geographical web information to assist the indoor navigation of people with special needs such as the visually impaired. To characterize these indoor environments, we surveyed three different specifications about taxonomies for environmental semantic information. Survey results show that even having different scopes, the three studied specifications share considerable environmental semantic information. In order to evaluate the validity of survey results, we created a set of environmental semantic information for a shopping center, and then performed a navigation experiment with 9 visually impaired participants in the same indoor location. A smartphone-based system providing audio navigation assistance based on accurate real-time localization in the shopping center was used to complete navigational tasks. Experiment results show an overall positive assessment from participants about the usefulness of the audio messages used. We present further findings about the assessment of the different audio messages by the study participants.
- Ahmetovic, D., Gleason, C., Ruan, C., Kitani, K., Takagi, H., and Asakawa, C. 2016. NavCog: a navigational cognitive assistant for the blind. In Proceedings of the 18th Internat. Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI'16), ACM, pp. 90--99. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Goetz, M., and Zipf, A. 2011. Extending OpenStreetMap to indoor environments: bringing volunteered geographic information to the next level. Urban and regional data management (UDMS'11), Taylor & Francis, pp. 47--58.Google Scholar
- Google Maps APIs (last accessed: December 2016) https://developers.google.com/maps/web-servicesGoogle Scholar
- Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Japan 2010. Proposed draft of pedestrian network data specification (last accessed: 17 November 2016) www.mlit.go.jp/common/000124059.pdfGoogle Scholar
- OpenStreetMap collaborative project (last accessed: 17 November 2016) wiki.openstreetmap.orgGoogle Scholar
- Wayfindr 2016. Open Standard for audio-based wayfinding. Working Draft ver. 1.0 (last accessed: 16 November 2016): www.wayfindr.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Wayfindr-Open-Standard-Working-Draft-1.0.pdfGoogle Scholar
Index Terms
- Assessment of Semantic Taxonomies for Blind Indoor Navigation Based on a Shopping Center Use Case
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