PERsonal NAvigation System for VIsually disabled People
Visually disabled(1) people have striking needs for trustful navigation systems enabling for efficient mobility services. Existing positioning and navigation technologies fail because they lack accuracy and reliability or rely on costly infrastructures. PERNASVIP aims to develop a GNSS-based mobility service dedicated to visually disabled pedestrians in urban environment, which meets the 4m level of accuracy and reliability they need for improving their day-to-day life autonomy. This project focuses on improving an existing prototype of portable guiding device with EGNOS/Galileo capabilities in three ways: Increasing positioning accuracy and integrity, reducing the time to first fix, developing specific multimodal routing algorithms.
PERNASVIP will be implemented in six verifiable objectives:
Users’ requirements defintion, with a particular attention to the three “accuracy, reliability and service availability” targets.
Improvement of the existing portable device with EGNOS/EDAS data treatment filters and algorithms in order to locate visually disabled pedestrian in urban environments within a 4-meter accuracy, 95% of time, with less than 15 seconds time to first fix.
Development of multimodal itinerary computation algorithms which take into account walking constraints and optimization parameters of importance for visually impaired pedestrians.
Design of the appropriate IT infrastructure and interface in order to combine the application with multi-layer data content such as public transportation databases, GIS or users’ community georeferenced information.
Test and validation of the service by 30 users in two pilot cities, with an objective of 75% satisfied users.
Dissemination of the project results and confirmation of the conditions for a successful business model.
(1)The terms ‘Disabled’ and ‘Impaired’ are equivalent. Visually impaired or disabled people refer to people having the same level of visual deficience, i.e blind or people suffering from absolute or severe blindness, deep or medium deficiency.