Outdoor Navigation Systems to Promote Urban Mobility to Aid Visually Impaired People

Abstract

Promoting social inclusion is a field of active research and an emergent topic relates to blind and visually impaired people. Among the difficulties they face, we address two which are related to the use of public transports and performing pedestrian routes between points of reference. Regarding the use of public transports, we address the difficulty blind people feel of knowing where they are along the way preventing them to ring the bell for the driver to stop, in an independent way. Regarding pedestrian walks, we developed a mobile application that allows users to walk to reference points such as the City Hall, Finances, Health Centre, etc. In this paper, we present a case study that targets the two mentioned problems, developed in the Historical Centre of Viana do Castelo, a city on the north of Portugal, made in cooperation with a Visually Impaired Association.