SeSaMoNet: an RFID-based economically viable navigation system for the visually impaired

Abstract

In this article, the authors present secure and safe mobility network (SeSaMoNet), a navigation and environment description system for users with visual impairments. The system is designed with attention to usability and accessibility features and for its great scalability. The spread of mobile technology such as handheld devices and related software, personal digital assistants and smartphones, wireless communication, text-tospeech, databases and finally radio frequency identification made it possible for the authors to build a portable, easy to use orientation and navigation aid that still has a great development margin. A double version, Symbian and Windows Mobile, allows quite every type of user equipment to be supported. The system aims to provide a nonintrusive and accessible way to expand the experiences of people with visual impairments and provide them with useful information about the environment beyond the tactile probing of the closest surroundings. This article expands previous work, detailing the usability and accessibility issues the authors faced and the new features introduced in the last period.

Evolution of Indoor Positioning Technologies: A Survey

“…The opposite configuration (user carrying the reader, with tags attached to the infrastructure) is seldom used, but there is an interesting example of indoor/outdoor use: in the SeSaMoNet deployed in Italy [68], the user to be located (who happens to be a blind person) carries the RFID reader, which is at the tip of a cane, and passive tags are buried inside sidewalks all over the city. Each tag is associated with a place in town, so as the blind person passes the cane over the floor, the embedded RFID tag answers with its ID, which is associated with information about that place (which is read audibly to the user) by means of a database.…”

UJAmI Location: A Fuzzy Indoor Location System for the Elderly

“…Multiple approaches or models that provide methodologies based on different technologies to locate people within enclosed spaces have been proposed. In this context, it is very common to use Ultra-Wideband [6,23,24], BLE combined with a device that has Bluetooth connection (activity band or other) [25][26][27][28] or even Radio-Frequency Identification [29][30][31][32].…”

Cost Effective and Easily Configurable Indoor Navigation System

“…It estimates the robot's position by using a sensorial system to measure the distances from the robot to five sensors by measuring the differential phase shifts in sinusoidal modulated infrared signal emitted by the robot, and then introducing the measured distances to a hyperbolic trilateration system. An RFID based localization system was deployed in Italy, to locate visually impaired people (Biader Ceipidor et al, 2009) where an RFID reader is installed at the tip of a cane and RFID tags are buried in the sidewalks through which the predefined location information embedded in them and a person's location is known. BLE technology is used to estimate the location of objects equipped with BLE tags and hence facilitates their navigation through the obtained location information.…”