A radio network for guidance and public transport assistance of the visually impaired

The paper presents a prototype radio network aiding the visually impaired in using the public transport. The main purpose of the network is to provide accurate and reliable location information as well as to enable access to location related context information. The data from radio nodes are used to facilitate the navigation in urban and indoor areas. Keeping up the connection with dedicated system servers gives access to additional services, e.g. enables the use of passenger information system and provides access to a database storing information on points of interest (POI) of different categories. The paper describes an overview of the system architecture. Then, the details of the positioning methods implemented in the solution are presented. Finally, the user-system interaction scenarios are discussed.