Mobile Computing for Indoor Wayfinding Based on Bluetooth Sensors for Individuals with Cognitive Impairments

In this paper, The Authors propose a novel personal guidance system based on Bluetooth for individuals with cognitive impairments.

For an adult with mental disorder may want to lead a more independent life and be capable of getting trained and keeping employed, but may experienced difficulty in using public transportation to and from the workplace. The growing recognition that assistive technology can be developed for cognitive as well as physical impairments has led several research groups to prototype way finding systems.

Bluetooth is an industrial specification for wireless personal area networks (PANs). Bluetooth provides a way to connect and exchange information between devices such as mobile phones, laptops, PCs, printers. In this paper, Bluetooth is used for personal way finding purposes where Bluetooth beacons and ID scanning are used. Bluetooth operated in this discovery mode saves power, eliminate manual passkey challenges, and reduce privacy and security concern as the use does not expose her ID. Based on the Bluetooth beacon received, the position where the user is can be identified at the remote server and enable the way finding sequences.

Prototype Design:

The Bluetooth beacons trigger downloading of photos with directional instructions, thus eliminating the need of a shadow support team behind the user. Route personalization is accomplished by the system identifying the user and the destination set ahead of time. Therefore, even sensing the same beacon on the same spot, different users may receive different directional instructions. It works indoors where GPS signals cannot reach. The design draws upon the psychological models of spatial navigation, usability studies of interfaces by people with cognitive impairments, and the requirements based on interviews with nurses and job coaches at rehabilitation hospitals and institutes.

A PDA is carried by the individual who has difficulty in indoor way finding or taking public transit to and from work. The PDA shows the just-in-time directions and instructions by displaying photos, triggered by Bluetooth beacons sensed by the PDA’s built-in reader. The photos have to be prepared ahead of time.

Although the routes are preset, very few patients can hook up the PDA to a networked PC so that photos can be stored on PDA and invoked immediately when needed. Alternatively, downloaded photos are locally cached for future use. This could potentially save communications energy and cost, while reducing response time.

Conclusions
This paper present a wayfinding prototype system based Bluetooth sensors for individuals with cognitive impairments. The design draws upon the cognitive models of spatial navigation and consists of wayfinding devices and a navigation system. The prototype is implemented and tested with routes in the campus. The results show the prototype is user friendly and promising with high reliability. The success ratio can depend on the extent to which participants suffer from mental disabilities, the complexity of routes, the degree of received training and self-practices, and the distractions the participants may encounter.