The goal of the project is to support the daily living of blind and visually impaired people in challenging tasks like participating in urban mobility, providing a simple, effective and affordable door to door navigation and mobility assistance solution.

Contrary to the usual tools providing only outdoor navigation, we also target situations when the blind person plans a journey which includes traveling through unfamiliar indoor environments (subway systems, train/bus stations) or when the journey targets visiting complex buildings (shopping mall, business center, public office).

In our view, besides the help provided in the daily living for the blind and visually impaired citizens, the envisioned service would be also interesting for companies, offices or infrastructure operators (e.g. local government) where blind people can work or just turn-out, by helping them to integrate and manage themselves in an open community.

In order to provide a truly door to door navigation service, which is currently missing from the market, we design and develop a service framework in which existing outdoor navigation services can be easily “plugged in”. Thus, the already familiar applications can be used in concordance with the proposed indoor mobility service, leading to cheaper and more effective door to door mobility assistance solutions. In the recent years, due to the remarkable steps in ICT innovation, a set of new possibilities have opened up, fostering the R&D related to mobility services (e.g. smartphone-based passenger information systems, route planners, navigators), where the travelers play a more active role like in classical Intelligent Transportation Systems. These people centered approaches aim to bring more interaction between the travelers and service providers, in order to provide user-centric, personalized and integrated multi-modal solutions.

While these solutions promise the advent of eco-friendly multi-modal mobility systems by promoting active user participation, encouraging travelers to re-think the way they travel, they fall short in proposing solutions which could fulfil the needs of particular traveler groups, like the blind and visually impaired people. For these users it is hard to provide accessible information and it is also cumbersome to use tools which require frequent interaction. Besides the aforementioned problems some aspects or certain possibilities hidden in the ecosystem of mobility users remain unexplored, these could be exploited to answer the special demands of visually impaired travelers. For example, travelers available on a specific transport service could be recruited on demand by the service to provide personal assistance for the blind person to get on/off from the respective vehicle. Therefore, we plan to provide a favorable environment for urban mobility management of blind and visually impaired people by building a mobility framework to facilitate a more viable and dynamic interaction between the different members of the urban transport ecosystem, such as the regular and visually impaired travelers. The framework will leverage both the information coming from legacy ITS (e.g. public transport) and crowd-based mobility services.

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