Mobile Crowd Assisted Navigation for the Visually Impaired
Greg Olmschenk, Christopher C. Yang, Zhigang Zhu, Hanghang Tong, William Seiple · 2015
The World Health Organization estimates that 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 million have low vision. In order to improve the overall situation without having the user feel encumbered, our Crowd Assisted Navigation app is designed for smartphones (including both iPhones and Android phones), which are by far the most commonly used mobile devices among those with low vision. Many individuals would rather forget their wallets at home than their phones. A smartphone is easily accessible and its use does not attract undue attention towards the user's need of aid for his/her disability. The app's primary objective is to assist a visually impaired or blind user in navigating from point A to point B through reliable directions given from an online community. The phone is able to stream live video to a crowd of sighted users through our website. The crowd is then able to give directions from the website with the push of one of the four arrow keys, indicating either left, right, forward, or stop. The aggregation of these directions will be relayed back to the user by audio.