Intelligent Vision Impaired Indoor Navigation Using Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Recent statistics of the World Health Organization (WHO) indicate that over 253 million of the world’s population to be visually impaired. Most of these individuals use the white cane as an assistive tool or are often accompanied by caretakers or voluntary helpers as indoor navigation is particularly challenging for them. This chapter describes a substitute vision system designed to assist vision impaired individuals through the use of visible light communication and geomagnetism. Furthermore, the use of database optimization increases the speed and efficiency of data retrieval thus reducing system response time. Though navigation systems that support the visual impaired are readily available, there have been no systems that use both visible light communication and geomagnetism capable of providing accurate and secure indoor navigation assistance, which in turn would increase the overall satisfaction of the system users.