Multimodal Route Planning for Blind and Visually Impaired People

Wayfinding and navigation services represent important components in the ecosystem of smart and sustainable mobility e-services. However, existing wayfinding services fall short in addressing the needs of Blind and Visually Impaired People (BVIP), particularly for multimodal urban transfers, i.e. those that involve both walking and public transportation services. The main challenge tackled by BVIP is to derive BVIP-friendly route plans (e.g., giving preference to road segments with tactile paving, crossings with acoustic traffic signals and public transit services adhering to high accessibility standards), thus strengthening their sense of safety and independence. The main contribution of this paper is an integrated solution for calculating multimodal routes and supporting real-time navigation, optimized for BVIP. Our solution makes use of BVIP-related annotation data available on OpenStreetMaps and integrates open multimodal route planning services (OpenTripPlanner) which consume multimodal transportation data compatible with the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). Our proposed system derives end-to-end multimodal routes considering a multitude of criteria which are of importance for BVIP. Real-time navigation is provided via a mobile application. Our system has been evaluated in several usage scenarios to validate its functionality and effectiveness.