Exploiting RFID for real time accessing and translation of public advertisements

One of the important characteristics of smart cities is ease in accessibility of information for residents and visitors alike. Language barriers, impairments and presence of crowd should not influence the context-awareness of the visitors in such cities. The information provided via advertisement boards play an important part in this regard. In this paper, we propose Smart ads-RFID based system for real time retrieval and translation of public advertisements. Candidate signs and advertisements are RFID-enabled and the electronic contents of such advertisements/signs are acquired and stored in a cloud database server. The system offers both real time and off-line text/voice translation into user´s preferred language and communicates the translated contents to user´s smart phone. The system also provides real time GIS map visualization of the RFID enabled advertisements in the city. It collects statistics regarding the number of users subscribed in the system, their locations, preferred language and most frequently used languages to help decision makers to decide when and where to post such advertisements. We described our developed pilot project and we investigated its usability, validity and usefulness using Fuzzy Rule-based System. We believe that such system could provide promising services within the context of smart cities.