A team of researchers has built two apps that only need the sensors fitted inside a phone to help blind people navigate buildings. It's almost magical ingenuity.
Tech for Change This story is part of Tech for Change: an ongoing series in which we shine a spotlight on positive uses of technology, and showcase how they're helping to make the world a better place. Updated less than 1 hour ago Table of Contents The first time I witnessed the challenges of disability was when I started college in 2016. My hostel mates came from across Asia and Africa, pursuing different career paths and hobbies, each with their own cultural identity and lived experiences.
These shortcomings range from unplanned infrastructure to a lack of a supportive tech stack. Saif Khan, an architect, tells me that there aren’t any standard directives in place to make buildings accessible for blind people. “The best we do is build ramps for people with motor disabilities,” Khan, who owns Pause Design Studio in India’s national capital, tells Digital Trends.
Roberto Manduchi, professor of computer science and engineering at UC Santa Cruz, spearheaded the development of these apps to help blind users move within a building using audio cues. The most convenient — and safest — part is that users don’t need to hold the phone while at it. The vision is similar to how modern AI chatbots can now process images, allowing users to simply point the camera and let the AI make sense of it.
To estimate the user’s position, a “dead reckoning” system is applied. “This is akin to the old navigation technique that computed a ship’s path using the compass for heading and a chip log for speed,” Manduchi explains. “You reconstruct the ship’s path by drawing a line on the map based on measured heading and speed.”
The team expressed confidence in the inertial-based localization technique driving the app, predominantly because it’s accessible and doesn’t require any external infrastructure to offer guidance services. However, Manduchi tells me that Wayfinding and Backtracking are “only experimental apps, still far from a distribution version.”
Now, the Wayfinding app is driven by the availability of floor plans. It would be useless if the app didn’t have the floor plan already saved in its directory. More specifically, the building floor plans need to be fed in a vectorized format.
Apps Backtracking Blind App Tech For Change Wayfinding
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