Introduction

The project is about multimodal navigation systems primarily targetting visually impaired people. Others who might benefit are those with memory loss or those getting into situations where they might be temporarily blinded such as fire fighters. Autonomous robot navigation can also benefit.
There are some commercially available GPS systems designed for visually impaired, as well as quite a few research prototypes using anything from GPS and WLAN to cameras and RFID tags. Those modes have been investigated separately, but relatively little has been done to fuse the technologies together to provide a richer and more accurate system that works in other environments than simply outdoors (GPS has this limitation). If we could create a very good multimodal system, the capabilities could extend far beyond simple navigation. Scene description would be enormously helpful for someone who can't use their eyes for that purpose. Other location-based services are possible and would be easy to integrate into such a system.
There are, however, many theoretical and practical issues that needs to be overcome. When information is received from multiple sources, the system needs to be able to judge how to use it and how to present it in an efficient and minimally distracting way. This can depend on both the user's preferences and his/her current environment. On the practical side, all those nice computations require energy and computing power (especially if computer vision is involved), and the system needs to be easy to carry around and use.
I am currently reviewing available systems both commercial and prototypes. I will post my progress on this blog.