California scientists have developed two apps to help visually impaired people navigate indoor environments

While Ilon Musk's team is working on the Neuralink Blindsight implant that will help visually impaired people regain their sight, scientists from California have developed an app that will enable the blind to navigate inside buildings.

Here's What We Know

Roberto Manduchi, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and colleagues have developed two new smartphone apps that will provide a safe method of orienteering where GPS is difficult.

The apps help you find your way indoors, get to the right point, and navigate back along the same route. The apps do not use a camera and do not require the user to hold the smartphone in front of them, making navigation more comfortable and safer.

Since GPS services are difficult to use in enclosed spaces, applications such as Google Maps cannot help blind people, but Manduchi searches for the way to the target on a map of the interior and tracks progress using inertial sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes built into the smartphone. And thanks to the particle filtering method, the signals do not pass through the walls of the premises and the app does not give false information. In addition to inertial sensors, the application uses the phone's magnetometer to detect magnetic field anomalies created by electrical appliances, which also helps orientate in an unfamiliar room.

The app gives voice instructions, and if you have a smartwatch, the prompts are augmented by vibration.

The application for finding the way back inverts the route taken earlier.

The developers tried to minimise the amount of information provided, so that the program does not overload the person with information and takes into account his safety.

The system warns the user about a change of direction five metres before a turn: for example, "turn left at the next corner".

The developers stress that the programme they have created will not solve all the problems of a blind person in an unfamiliar building and he will still have to use a cane or a guide dog, but the Manduchi system will facilitate and speed up the process of movement and will become a virtual hand that will guide the blind person through unfamiliar corridors.

Source: News-medical.net