A technological innovation to safely aid in the spatial orientation of blind people in a complex urban environment

Abstract

In the broader context of smart cities, to ensure mobility of people regardless of their physical or sensory condition becomes a complex and difficult challenge to be treated. All papers referenced in this work are presented as a solution to equip the blind people with devices and sensors (controlled by a computational system) with the ability to capture environmental structure data and somehow describe it to the understanding of the blind people. Our work explores another side of this problem: how the environment can transmit data about itself to safely-help guide blind orientation in this environment? In other words, from our view, the environment must report data on its structure as opposed to make the blind person try to extract these data from this environment. So, here we propose to use an intelligent semaphore system (traffic lights) to communicate with a mobile system carried by the blind person and by the coherent processing of the signals sent and received between the mobile device and the intelligent semaphore, to conduct the blind in the streets crossing the crosswalk safely.