• Journal of rehabilitation welfare engineering & assistive technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.315-321
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• 2017

This paper is a study on the design and realization of Pedestrian navigation service system for the visually impaired. As it is an user interface considering visually impaired, voice recognition functioned smartphone was used as the input tool and the Osteoacusis headset, which can vocally guide directions while recognizing the surrounding environment sound, was used as the output tool. Unlike the pre-existing pedestrian navigation smartphone apps, the developed system guides walking direction by the scale of the left and right stereo sound of the headset wearing, and the voice guidance about the forked or curved path is given several meters before according to the speed of the user, and the user is immediately warned of walking opposite direction or proceeding off the path. The system can acquire stable and reliable directional information using the motion tracker with the dynamic heading accuracy of 1.5 degrees. In order to overcome GPS position error, we proposed a robust trajectory planning algorithm for position error. Experimental results for the developed system show that the average directional angle error is 6.82 degrees (standard deviation: 5.98) in the experimental path, which can be stated that it stably navigated the user relatively.