An Indoor Navigation Solution for Visually Impaired People
Abstract
This article describes the development of a mobile application designed to assist the navigation of visually impaired individuals in indoor environments. The application interacts with Bluetooth devices called beacons, which help identify the trajectory. The beacons’ arrangement and the environment’s computational modeling were carried out using techniques such as trapezoidal decomposition and graph representation. The application uses threads to identify the shortest paths between source and destination beacons. It also provides audio instructions about the locations the user must pass through to reach the destination, correcting routes if the user is heading in the wrong direction or location. We validated the solution in a real-world environment and proved capable of successfully guiding the user within the studied environment.
References
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Li, X., Xu, D., Wang, X., and Muhammad, R. (2016). Design and implementation of indoor positioning system based on iBeacon. In 2016 International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing (ICALIP), pages 126–130. IEEE.
Nagarajan, B., Shanmugam, V., Ananthanarayanan, V., and Bagavathi Sivakumar, P. (2020). Localization and indoor navigation for visually impaired using Bluetooth Low Energy. In Smart systems and IoT: innovations in computing, pages 249–259. Springer.
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Al-Ammar, M. A., Alhadhrami, S., Al-Salman, A., Alarifi, A., Al-Khalifa, H. S., Alnafessah, A., and Alsaleh, M. (2014). Comparative survey of indoor positioning technologies, techniques, and algorithms. In 2014 International Conference on Cyberworlds, pages 245–252. IEEE.
Alqahtani, E. J., Alshamrani, F. H., Syed, H. F., and Alhaidari, F. A. (2018). Survey on algorithms and techniques for indoor navigation systems. In 2018 21st Saudi Computer Society National Computer Conference (NCC), pages 1–9. IEEE.
Amutha, B. and Nanmaran, K. (2014). Development of a ZigBee based virtual eye for visually impaired persons. In 2014 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), pages 564–574. IEEE.
Bahl, P. and Padmanabhan, V. (2000). Radar: an in-building rf-based user location and tracking system. In Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2000. Conference on Computer Communications. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (Cat. No.00CH37064), volume 2, pages 775–784.
Barraquand, J. and Latombe, J.-C. (1991). Robot motion planning: A distributed representation approach. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 10(6):628–649.
Bluetooth, S. (2010). Bluetooth core specification version 4.0. Specification of the Bluetooth System, 1(7):206.
Chen, H.-E., Lin, Y.-Y., Chen, C.-H., and Wang, I.-F. (2015). Blind-navi: A navigation app for the visually impaired smartphone user. In Proceedings of the 33rd annual ACM conference extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems, pages 19–24.
Ganz, A., Schafer, J., Gandhi, S., Puleo, E., Wilson, C., and Robertson, M. (2012). Percept indoor navigation system for the blind and visually impaired: architecture and experimentation. International journal of telemedicine and applications, 2012.
Huang, H., Gartner, G., Krisp, J. M., Raubal, M., and Van de Weghe, N. (2018). Location based services: ongoing evolution and research agenda. Journal of Location Based Services, 12(2):63–93.
IBGE (2019). Sistema IBGE de Recuperação Automática. Banco de Tabelas Estatísticas. Pesquisa Nacional de Saneamento Básico. Available: [link]; Accessed: 05/01/2025.
Kárník, J. and Streit, J. (2016). Summary of available indoor location techniques. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 49(25):311–317.
Kim, J.-E., Bessho, M., Kobayashi, S., Koshizuka, N., and Sakamura, K. (2016). Navigating visually impaired travelers in a large train station using smartphone and Bluetooth Low Energy. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pages 604–611.
Kontact (2022). Introducing SB18-3, a BLE beacon for modern stationary deployments. Available in: [link], Accessed: 22-01-2025.
Kunhoth, J., Karkar, A., Al-Maadeed, S., and Al-Ali, A. (2020). Indoor positioning and wayfinding systems: a survey. Human-centric Computing and Information Sciences, 10(1):1–41.
Legge, G. E., Beckmann, P. J., Tjan, B. S., Havey, G., Kramer, K., Rolkosky, D., Gage, R., Chen, M., Puchakayala, S., and Rangarajan, A. (2013). Indoor navigation by people with visual impairment using a digital sign system. PloS one, 8(10):e76783.
Li, X., Xu, D., Wang, X., and Muhammad, R. (2016). Design and implementation of indoor positioning system based on iBeacon. In 2016 International Conference on Audio, Language and Image Processing (ICALIP), pages 126–130. IEEE.
Nagarajan, B., Shanmugam, V., Ananthanarayanan, V., and Bagavathi Sivakumar, P. (2020). Localization and indoor navigation for visually impaired using Bluetooth Low Energy. In Smart systems and IoT: innovations in computing, pages 249–259. Springer.
Newman, N. (2014). Apple iBeacon technology briefing. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, 15(3):222–225.
Pešović, U. M., Mohorko, J. J., Benkič, K., and Čučej, Ž. F. (2010). Single-hop vs. Multi-hop - energy efficiency analysis in wireless sensor networks. In 18th telecommunications forum, TELFOR.
Rosiak, M., Kawulok, M., and Maćkowski, M. (2024). The effectiveness of uwb-based indoor positioning systems for the navigation of visually impaired individuals. Applied Sciences, 14(13):5646.
Shi, T. and Gong, W. (2024). A survey of bluetooth indoor localization.
Zare, F., Sedighi, P., and Delrobaei, M. (2023). A wearable rfid-based navigation system for the visually impaired. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.14792.
Published
2025-07-20
How to Cite
FARIA, João Vitor de; FRINHANI, Rafael de Magalhães Dias; CARVALHO, Luiz Olmes.
An Indoor Navigation Solution for Visually Impaired People. In: INTEGRATED SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE SEMINAR (SEMISH), 52. , 2025, Maceió/AL.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 37-48.
ISSN 2595-6205.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/semish.2025.7101.
