PERNASVIP · PERsonal NAvigation System for VIsually disabled People

Visually disabled people have striking needs for trustful navigation systems enabling for efficient mobility services. Existing positioning and navigation technologies fail because they lack accuracy and reliability or rely on costly infrastructures.PERNASVIP aims to develop a GNSS-based mobility service dedicated to visually disabled pedestrians in urban environment, which meets the 4m level of accuracy and reliability they need for improving their day-to-day life autonomy.This 18-month project aims at enhancing an existing prototype of portable guiding device through the integration of EGNOS functionalities in order to increase positioning accuracy and integrity; to reduce the time to first fix; and to develop a multimodal routing travelling assistance tool.It will be implemented with six verifiable objectives:•Users’ requirements definition, with a particular attention to the “accuracy, reliability and service availability” targets•Enhancement of the existing portable device with EGNOS / EDAS data treatment filters and algorithms in order to locate visually disabled pedestrian in urban environments within a 4m accuracy, 95% of time, with less than 15 seconds of time to first fix•Development of multimodal itinerary computation algorithms which take into account walking constraints and optimization parameters of importance for visually impaired pedestrians•Design of the appropriate IT web-based service platform and associated data infrastructure in order to combine the application with multi-layer data content such as public transportation databases, GIS or users’ community geo-referenced information•Validation of the service by 30 users in two pilot cities with an objective of 75% satisfied users•Dissemination of the project results and conditions for a successful business model10 years of cooperation between PERNASVIP project partners and major associations for visually impaired will provide access to this market of 13 million users.