Video: A Smartphone App Helps the Visually Impaired Navigate Indoors
NICT and Fujitsu's Realtime Indoor Guidance System via DigInfo News Using a smartphone and ultra wide band (UWB) transmission technology, Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Fujitsu have teamed to create a realtime positioning system for the blind that works indoors where GPS can't reach. Using base stations to triangulate a user's position, the system is accurate to within 30 centimeters, or roughly one foot. The system is pretty simple: using nanosecond-long pulses of UWB, the phone communicates with the base stations, allowing each one to calculate the phone's distance from it. Those calculations are then further crunched by a central control unit that is able to triangulate the smartphone's position. This positioning data is then sent to the phone, where an app displays the position on a map as well as offers realtime audio prompts describing the direction and distance to certain pre-defined targets. The system could...