Title:	BLUEEYES – EASING THE NAVIGATION AND ORIENTATION OF BLIND PEOPLE
Author(s):	Marta Silva, Anabela Gomes, Ana Rita Teixeira and João Orvalho
ISBN:	978-989-8533-79-1
Editors:	Katherine Blashki and Yingcai Xiao
Year:	2018
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Beacons, Internet of thinks, Human Computer Interaction, Context-aware mobile computing, Accessibility, Blind
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	117
Last Page:	124
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	As reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), of the 7 billion people alive today, an estimated 253 million live with visual impairment that cannot be corrected with glasses or contact lenses. From these, 30 million blind or partially sighted persons live in Europe. Over the past years, blindness that is caused by diseases has decreased due to the success of public health actions. However, the number of blind people that are over 60 years old is increasing by 2 million per decade. Unfortunately, all these numbers are estimated to be doubled by 2020. With these facts, is necessary to bring awareness and understanding of the challenges blind people face and help to motivate research into new technology to answer those questions. This document starts to identify the challenges people with visual disabilities face in their life. The problem of navigation and orientation as well the different possibilities to deal with the locomotion situation is also addressed in this paper. It describes the traditional navigational solutions as well other which involves more sophisticated technological devices and their multimodal interfaces. The paper ends with the description of the BlueEyes project (Orvalho, 2016), consisting in a solution to help blind people moving in a city. The first phases of the project are described, and the actual research situations is also slightly explained.
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