Indoor guidance system for the visual impaired using beacon sensors

Abstract

This study aims to develop a beacon activated indoor guidance system for visual impaired persons. Based on the “Mobile Accessibility Guidelines” developed by British Broadcasting Corporation, our system provides a vocal feedback mechanism with easy touchscreen gesture design operated with mobile devices which can help instruct the visual impaired people to navigate the indoor spaces area such as department store and office. Our system uses NoSQL database, Firebase, as the backend database which uses JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) as the data exchange and storage format. The design model implemented in the system is MVC (Model-View-Control) which provides the system more maintainable and extendable. In order to provide flexible indoor space configuration in the system, we design a text-based space configuration scheme which can support the users to define a new indoor space very easily.