POI explorer - A sonified mobile application aiding the visually impaired in urban navigation

The paper presents POI Explorer mobile application aiding the visually impaired in spatial orientation and in urban navigation. A user equipped with a smartphone with accelerometer, electronic compass, mobile data transmission and positioning capabilities can access information on nearby points of interest. Maintaining data connection with dedicated system servers provides access to additional services facilitating the navigation in urban areas. The paper describes an overall architecture of the system. Then, the details of the user interface of the application are presented. The user interface of the application was designed to meet both the needs of visually impaired users and the requirements imposed by dynamic data changes. It employs a unique combination of text-to-speech and sonification techniques to ensure clarity of messages as well as high responsiveness of the application. The results of experiments performed in areas with different densities of points of interest proved the usability of the proposed approach.