ABSTRACT
Introduction: Individuals with mobility impairments associated with lower limb disabilities often face enormous challenges to participate in routine activities and to move around various environments. For many, the use of wheelchairs is paramount to provide mobility and social inclusion. Nevertheless, they still face a number of challenges to properly function in our society. Among the many difficulties, one in particular stands out: navigating in complex internal environments (indoors). The main objective of this work is to propose an architecture based on Mobile Augmented Reality to support the development of indoor navigation systems dedicated to wheelchair users, that is also capable of recording CAD drawings of the buildings and dealing with accessibility issues for that population. Methods Overall, five main functional requirements are proposed: the ability to allow for indoor navigation by means of Mobile Augmented Reality techniques; the capacity to register and configure building CAD drawings and the position of fiducial markers, points of interest and obstacles to be avoided by the wheelchair user; the capacity to find the best route for wheelchair indoor navigation, taking stairs and other obstacles into account; allow for the visualization of virtual directional arrows in the smartphone displays; and incorporate touch or voice commands to interact with the application. The architecture is proposed as a combination of four layers: User interface; Control; Service; and Infrastructure. A proof-of-concept application was developed and tests were performed with disable volunteers operating manual and electric wheelchairs. Results The application was implemented in Java for the Android operational system. A local database was used to store the test building CAD drawings and the position of fiducial markers and points of interest. The Android Augmented Reality library was used to implement Augmented Reality and the Blender open source library handled the basis for implementing directional navigation arrows. OpenGL ES provided support for various graphics and mathematical transformations for embedded systems, such as smartphones. Experiments were performed in an academic building with various labs, classrooms and male and female bathrooms. Two disable volunteers using wheelchairs showed no difficulties to interact with the application, either by entering touch or voice commands, and to navigate within the testing environment with the help of the navigational arrows implemented by the augmented reality modules. Conclusion The novel features implemented in the proposed architecture, with special emphasis on the use of Mobile Augmented Reality and the ability to identify the best routes free of potential hazards for wheelchair users, were capable of providing significant benefits for wheelchair indoor navigation when compared to current techniques described in the literature.
ABSTRACT
O G-SADA é um sistema computacional de gerenciamento que auxilia o gerente da propriedade rural e o operador da máquina agrícola nas tomadas de decisão, informando sobre valores de operações fora dos padrões. O sistema tem como características permitir a) o acompanhamento do desempenho da máquina enquanto ela está em operação no campo, com funcionalidades em tempo real, b) a mobilidade do usuário por poder ser acessado a partir de qualquer tipo de computador, incluindo dispositivos móveis, como smartphones, e c) possuir funcionalidades de acesso à base de dados estática. Um dos resultados deste trabalho é a modelagem de dados e de funções de uma aplicação que utiliza dados armazenados dinamicamente com a máquina em operação no campo, fornecidos por sensores implantados na máquina agrícola, disponibilizando informações em tempo real.
The G-SADA is a computer system that assists the management of the farm manager and the operator of agricultural machinery in decision making, reporting values of non- standard operations. The system is characterized by allowing a) monitoring the performance of the machine while it is operating in the field, with features in real time, b) mobility of the user because it can be accessed from any computer, including mobile devices such as smartphones, c) and features with access to the database static. One of the results of this research is the modeling data and functions of an application that uses data stored dynamically with the machine in operation in the field, provided by sensors deployed in agricultural machinery, showing real time information.