Indoor Navigation: The Next Frontier Photo depicts Paul independently finding his way to the audio book section in a library, using Nearby Explorer on an iPhone
Indoor Explorer, an upcoming function of APH's Nearby Explorer app, will allow detailed navigation within buildings that have been mapped and equipped with beacons. by Larry Skutchan Accurate indoor location capabilities are the next frontier in mobility apps for people who are blind or visually impaired. Even after decades of improvements, GPS reception is still obstructed without a clear view of the sky. Industry experts predict better indoor coverage, but it has been slow coming. Alternative sources of location information include numerous technologies, but each has its weaknesses. Ultimately, precise location information will use a combination of technologies. Beacons for Indoor Location One method of determining one's place indoors includes the use of beacons that periodically transmit small bursts of data. If an app watches for those transmissions, it can correlate that beacon's identification with information about its precise location. The app uses this information along with the signal strength of the beacon and other beacons that may be in the vicinity to help determine the user's location. Once the app has a location, it can access the traditional points of interest (POIs) just as it does with outdoor features. While this method sounds obvious and simple, there are some conditions that make it less than optimal. The most onerous obstacle for using beacon technology is the fact that the beacons must be configured and installed in every location that provides coverage. A more ideal solution, like GPS, would provide coverage universally. The second obstacle is the lack of indoor maps and standards. Numerous commercial entities continue to work on increasing indoor coverage, but progress seems much slower than the days when Google mapped the world by driving it. Many want to ensure public indoor mapping information also remains free and available to all. Some differences between indoor and outdoor mapping include provisions for individual floors in a building, large rooms, and access to floor plans. It takes even more of a coordinated and grass roots effort to map this diverse space. And it takes a well-executed, scalable platform. photo of a yellow beacon Small beacons, often placed above doorways, help Indoor Explorer guide you through a building. OpenStreetMap is an online map platform designed to be edited by the community. It includes support for beacon placement. It is free to use, and already includes an ecosystem with tools. Mapping a building involves comparing floor plans and physical observations with a satellite view of the building, then drawing and labeling features of each floor into OpenStreetMap with the Simple Indoor Tagging scheme. Finally, determining beacon placement, configuring the beacons, and adding their information to the map must be done. As you can tell, this is quite a bit of work. Fortunately, the infrastructure, standards, and tools exist to enable this dream. All that is left to make it happen is a lot of hard work. Indoor Explorer Coming to Nearby Explorer Nearby ExplorerT is a full-featured GPS app from APH designed for use by people who are visually impaired. This app can now make use of beacons and indoor information in OpenStreetMap. When the app detects a beacon, it searches for it in OpenStreetMap. If it is there, the app looks up the beacon's latitude, longitude, and floor number from the database. It also looks up points of interest on that floor of the building and reports their name, distance, and position as you move, or it lets you use the GeoBeam feature to point to features inside the building. When using the app indoors, the compass, in addition to reporting the direction, names all the building features in that direction. So far, APH has mapped parts of the APH building, a neighborhood branch library, a Louisville civic innovation hub, and the hotel in Pittsburgh that is hosting the AER OM conference, where Project Leader Keith Creasy will speak and demonstrate the app. Before the conference begins, APH will release an update to Nearby ExplorerT that includes support for indoor locations that anyone can map. In addition to using these indoor maps while at the venue, app users can move virtually to that location and explore the building's points of interest. While these features will appear first in Nearby ExplorerT, APH plans to create a free app that anyone can download on the spot. Venues can advertise their accessible map with signage that displays a QR code to directly download the app. The distribution goal is to create a library that any app developer can use to include this capability and to document and promote a simple process for mapping the building and configuring the beacons using existing infrastructure and making it available for anyone to use. APH President Dr. Craig Meador has shared that part of APH's strategic plan is to make a bigger impact locally, nationally, and internationally. Part of the local impact can be to help make Louisville, Kentucky, the most accessible city in the world to blind and visually-impaired citizens and visitors. Louisville's open data policy, engaged community, and progressive mayor provide the ideal environment to create this reality. While it is important for public buildings to be accessible, most places outside the home include businesses, museums, medical, or transportation venues. It is important to work with community leaders, business owners, and the community to identify the places to start, map the building, and obtain feedback about its effectiveness. One of the earliest facets of the project is refining the map creation and determining where beacons will be placed. As part of that effort, APH plans to work once again with Civic Data Alliance to align the missions of both organizations then publish outcomes, recommendations, and tutorials, so the model spreads nationally and internationally. We recognize that most locations will not elect to map venues themselves, so exploration of business models to support this work will be of interest to many. This summer, APH is sending researchers to three summer conventions to help determine what makes an accessible city to you and what indoor spaces would be most useful to map. Each participant expresses his or her opinion on a few short questions and is invited to take the full online survey or call a number to take it with a friendly human. You can take the survey, too, at www.aph.org/ac or by calling 800-322-1839 ext. 705 to participate. Survey closes August 18, 2017. Other interesting aspects of the project include continuing to work with others and to find ways to use beacons that already exist for other purposes, and making the beacons from this project available to other technology that may wish to use their position and metadata as an aid. A complete solution may even include the ability to emboss or interactively graphically represent floor plans to public places. In addition to beacons, computer vision, artificial intelligence, magnetics, Wi-Fi triangulation, and using whatever possible source of input to help more accurately determine one's position in GPS-denied environments will be essential. And while many of these technologies are less mature, their impact will be much more profound than the beacon-based system described here. The beacon-based technology may be relatively short lived while better alternatives evolve, but the maps created in this project can serve as a foundation to any of those additional technologies. Future Plans Future considerations include combining technologies to eliminate the need for floor plans, and instead, interactively map a venue by walking through it. It is startling how close we are to this reality, with technology like Google's Vision Positioning System, Microsoft's Guide Path app, and the still unrealized universal GPS coverage. As all these technologies evolve and mature, APH must stay engaged. Mapping public spaces and using beacons is something that works today. Much research, in fact, continues on methods of determining a beacon's distance and triangulating among beacons in various environments. We already know we can use a beacon to mark a point of interest, and that alone is incredibly useful and can be enough for many venues. More interestingly, however, using a beacon's position in space and combining that with the user's proximity to it and other points of interest can provide surprisingly detailed amounts of information in GPS-denied environments. To keep informed and converse about the subject, consider subscribing to the indoor discussion list by sending a blank email to [email protected]. For additional information about the techniques used, see the Nearby Explorer User's Guide . <http://tech.aph.org/ne_info.htm> http://tech.aph.org/ne_info.htm ____________________________________________________________________________ __ Gateway For the Blind LLC. Denny Huff PO Box 515 St. Clair, MO 63077 Phone: (636) 428-1500 Fax: 314-558-0298 Email: [email protected] <http://www.gatewayfortheblind.com> www.gatewayfortheblind.com THE GATEWAY TO INDEPENDENCE
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