Assisting mobility of the disabled using space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure

ABSTRACT

In achieving the mobility assistance for the individuals with different disabilities, it is required to recognize places with different granularities defined based on human interest, which is hard to be accomplished using traditional GPS-based approaches. In order to meet this requirement, a space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure designed upon the concept of the universal design has been proposed, which is capable of constructing a service that is aware of places of human interest using ubiquitous computing technologies. Upon this infrastructure, two case studies are performed in the existing civil space, consisting of a pedestrian navigation service for the individuals with different needs, and a mobility assistant service for the visually-impaired. Through these case studies, the possibilities of the proposed infrastructure are discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Masahiro Bessho , Shinsuke Kobayashi , Noboru Koshizuka , Ken Sakamura, A space-identifying ubiquitous infrastructure and its application for tour-guiding service, Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 16-20, 2008, Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1363686.1364069]
• 2: Alan L. Liu , Harlan Hile , Henry Kautz , Gaetano Borriello , Pat A. Brown , Mark Harniss , Kurt Johnson, Indoor wayfinding:: developing a functional interface for individuals with cognitive impairments, Proceedings of the 8th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 23-25, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1168987.1169005]
• 3: Lisa Ran , Sumi Helal , Steve Moore, Drishti: An Integrated Indoor/Outdoor Blind Navigation System and Service, Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'04), p.23, March 14-17, 2004

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Real-time and embedded systems

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
location-based service, mobility assistant service, ubiquitous computing