RFID and dead-reckoning- based indoor navigation for visually impaired pedestrians

This chapter presents an indoor navigation solution for visually impaired pedestrians, which employs a combination of a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag array and dead-reckoning to achieve positioning and localisation. This form of positioning aims to reduce the deployment cost and complexity of pure RFID array implementations. This is a smartphone-based navigation system that leverages the new advancements of smartphone hardware to achieve large data handling and fast pathfinding. Users interact with the system through speech recognition and synthesis. This approach allows the system to be accessible to the masses due to the ubiquity of smartphones today. Uninformed pathfinding algorithms are implemented onto this system based on our previous study on the implementation suitability of uninformed searches. Testing results showed that this navigation system is suitable for use for the visually impaired pedestrians; and the pathfinding algorithms performed consistently according to our algorithm proposals.