Blind MuseumTourer: A System for Self-Guided Tours in Museums and Blind Indoor Navigation

Abstract

Notably valuable efforts have focused on helping people with special needs. In this work, we build upon the experience from the BlindHelper smartphone outdoor pedestrian navigation app and present Blind MuseumTourer, a system for indoor interactive autonomous navigation for blind and visually impaired persons and groups (e.g., pupils), which has primarily addressed blind or visually impaired (BVI) accessibility and self-guided tours in museums. A pilot prototype has been developed and is currently under evaluation at the Tactual Museum with the collaboration of the Lighthouse for the Blind of Greece. This paper describes the functionality of the application and evaluates candidate indoor location determination technologies, such as wireless local area network (WLAN) and surface-mounted assistive tactile route indications combined with Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons and inertial dead-reckoning functionality, to come up with a reliable and highly accurate indoor positioning system adopting the latter solution. The developed concepts, including map matching, a key concept for indoor navigation, apply in a similar way to other indoor guidance use cases involving complex indoor places, such as in hospitals, shopping malls, airports, train stations, public and municipality buildings, office buildings, university buildings, hotel resorts, passenger ships, etc. The presented Android application is effectively a Blind IndoorGuide system for accurate and reliable blind indoor navigation.

Towards a Training Framework for Improved Assistive Mobile App Acceptance and Use Rates by Blind and Visually Impaired People

“…It will inform the BVI about POIs and will allow selection of POIs and the dynamic issuing of voice navigation instructions towards POIs considering the current position of the BVI. Blind IndoorGuide inherits the features of the Blind MuseumTourer system, as they are presented in [15]. It aims to extend the functionality of the Blind MuseumTourer beyond the case of museums.…”

“…It aims to extend the functionality of the Blind MuseumTourer beyond the case of museums. The conceptualization of the Blind IndoorGuide is discussed in [15].…”

“…Other apps, such as BlindSquare [6], provide information concerning points of interest during outdoor navigation. Academic research has been focusing on the requirements and the development of systems that assist outdoor navigation [7][8][9][10], indoor navigation systems ( [11][12][13][14][15][16] among others), or both [17] for the BVI. In this context, there is significant and increasing demand for autonomous navigation systems especially designed for BVIs.…”

An indoor navigation architecture using variable data sources for blind and visually impaired persons

“…The Blind MuseumTourer [13] is being developed for selfguided tours in museums, and the authors claim that it can be easily modified and customized to be applied in other use cases. Being the WLAN-based location determination considered a challenging project by the authors, the solution implemented uses Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons as proximity sensors to POIs position determination enhanced with inertial dead-reckoning calculations through step counting, heading and turn recognition.…”

Disruptive network innovation in free guided tours

“…Guided tours and innovation have been studied in relation to its content, as in the case of Budapest, where Rátz (2017) shows that niche tours can contribute to the repositioning of the city. Apart from this, innovation in relation to guided tours has primarily been understood in terms of technical innovation, as in the study of Meliones and Sampson (2018). To the authors' knowledge, however, there are no other studies connecting the concepts of social network, innovation and guided tours.…”