Navigation system for blind, hearing and visually impaired people in ITU Ayazaga campus

Abstract

Navigation systems for impaired people is one of the recent developed applications for hearing or visually impaired people within the context of the in-door navigation technology that compatible with the smart phones. Loud steps is one of the examples of them. The application serves for guiding hearing and visually impaired people with the help of reading voice features of routing to independently around various places. Offices, homes, schools, hospitals, bus stations, airports, public institutions and other social and sport facilities …etc. are among these destinations. It has been downloaded and used by 130.000 users including more than 20.000 visually impaired people at various institutions in 11 countries. The first implementation of the loud steps in Istanbul Technical University (ITU) was the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Ayazaga Campus area. Subsequently, the application has been established for another 4 buildings including lecture halls and 3 techno park buildings in campus. During the later stages of this project, the establishment of system will be carried out for the remained 12 faculties and 6 institutes located in the campus area. Moreover, outdoor navigation system also established to the campus to make all indoor system integrated for the benefits of hearing or visually impaired people around the whole 2.500.000 square meters campus area. Therefore, ITU Ayazaga Campus has an integrated indoor and outdoor navigation systems which taking these kind of people from any campus entrances using the outdoor navigation systems and to the any halls, lecturer's offices, laboratories, information desk, toilets, elevators also other emergency facilities such as fire exits or fire-escape stairs…etc. providing voice guidance with also visual navigation.