Ubibus: Ubiquitous computing to help blind people in public transport

Abstract

Ubibus is an application designed to help blind or visually impaired people to take public transport. The application allows the user to request in advance the bus of his choice to stop, and to be notified when the right bus has arrived. The user may use either a PDA (equipped with a WLAN interface) or a Bluetooth mobile phone. The system is designed to be integrated discretely in the bus service via ubiquitous computing principles. It tries to minimize both the amount of required changes in the service operation, and explicit interactions with the mobile device. This is done by augmenting real-life interactions with data processing, through a programming paradigm called spatial programming. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.