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Anonymous Indoor Navigation System on Handheld Mobile Devices for Visually Impaired

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Abstract

An indoor positioning and navigation system based on measurements of received signal strength in wireless local area network is proposed. In the system, the location determination problem is solved by applying compressive sensing, which offers recovery of sparse signals from a small number of noisy measurements by solving an ℓ1-minimization problem. The refined estimate is then used with a map-adaptive Kalman filter for real-time tracking. A navigation module integrated with the tracking system guides users to pre-defined destinations with voice instructions. Experimental results with a system that was implemented on a PDA shows that the proposed tracking system is lightweight so that it can be used on a resource constrained platform while outperforming the widely used traditional positioning and tracking systems. A pilot study was carried out with 30 visually impaired subjects from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Testing results show that the proposed system can be used to guide visually impaired subjects to their desired destinations with a very high success rate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Chen Feng, Shahrokh Valaee, Anthea Wain Sy Au, Sameh Sorour & Moshe Eizenman

  2. Department of Ophthalmology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Sophia Reyes, Samuel N. Markowitz & Moshe Eizenman

  3. Research Department, The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), Toronto, ON, Canada

    Deborah Gold & Keith Gordon

  4. Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Moshe Eizenman

Authors
  1. Chen Feng
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  2. Shahrokh Valaee
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  3. Anthea Wain Sy Au
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  4. Sophia Reyes
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  5. Sameh Sorour
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  6. Samuel N. Markowitz
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  7. Deborah Gold
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  8. Keith Gordon
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  9. Moshe Eizenman
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chen Feng.

Additional information

Chen Feng, currently works at Qualcomm Inc. as a senior software engineer.

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Feng, C., Valaee, S., Au, A.W.S. et al. Anonymous Indoor Navigation System on Handheld Mobile Devices for Visually Impaired. Int J Wireless Inf Networks 19, 352–367 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-012-0194-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10776-012-0194-0

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