A blind user-centered navigation system with crowdsourced situation awareness

Abstract

This article presents a novel approach of utilizing the Internet of things (IoT) to create situational awareness to the blind user. Our previous work uses wearable sensors in the physical world to estimate the user location based on metric and landmark localization. Currently, we augment our system with streaming data from the cyber world to provide situational awareness by summarizing the events around the user based on the proposed crowdsourced localization. Our localization algorithm quickly gauge the relevant aspects of an event and renders a positional-audio feedback in a virtual 3D space around the user. This enhances the user to actively participate in an interesting social event by navigating towards them or avoid any mishaps on their path. Our results shown that it is feasible to make a blind user to travel independently by integrating our real-time localization technologies with the fusion of wearable sensors and social sensors.