SCC-Planning: CityGuide: Beacon-Based Community-Driven Inclusive Wayfinding

对于我们社区的残疾人来说，寻路一直是一项挑战。在一个城市中，仍然有室内和许多室外区域，目前基于卫星的系统的有效性有限或根本不存在。拟议项目的长期目标是利用技术使城市对残疾人和那些可能需要额外帮助的人更无障碍、更安全。该项目朝着这一目标迈出的第一步是在威奇托市设计和部署一个名为CityGuide的社区范围的寻路系统，该系统依赖于蓝牙低能量(BLE)无线信息发射器的战略性部署的基础设施。CityGuide计划发展为威奇托市、威奇托州立大学(WSU)(一所为城市服务的研究型大学)和EnVision(当地一家为盲人和视障人士服务的非营利性组织)之间的合作伙伴关系。该项目的目标是为满足城市指南的三个长期需求奠定基础：综合和基础研究贡献、研究能力建设和社区参与。为此，该项目提出了确定研究优先事项的活动，并启动了实现《城市指南》愿景的计划。该项目产生的更广泛的社会影响包括：(I)为有特殊需要的人开发认路技术，以及(Ii)为普通民众创造工具，使各种地理围栏应用成为可能。更广泛的教育影响包括：(I)提供一个多学科研究生班，重点是通过移动技术解决残疾带来的社会挑战，以及(Ii)将无障碍方面纳入本科生研究。设想中的CityGuide应用程序建议(I)补充室外GPS系统(在集成的智能手机应用程序中)，以在室内和室外空间内或跨室内和室外空间提供细粒度的、定制的、逐个转弯的导航，供视觉或身体残疾的人和普通人群使用；(Ii)补充现有的指示牌，并提供关于社区感兴趣的特征的定制信息。致力于该项目的多学科团队将合作开展活动，为解决如何为社区中有特殊需要的人设计和部署有效和可用的定向系统这一研究问题奠定基础。回答这个问题将做出以下跨学科的基础研究贡献：(I)如何在室内和室外空间部署和配置大规模低成本无线嵌入式设备以有效地寻路？(Ii)如何利用环境中这些嵌入式设备的信息(以及哪些信息)来同时满足社区内公民不同的特殊需求？以及(Iii)我们如何构建可用的人机界面来寻路，同时满足残疾带来的各种人类限制？

Wayfinding has always remained a challenge for people with disabilities in our communities. There remain indoor and many outdoor areas within a city where the effectiveness of current satellite-based systems is limited or non-existent. The long-term goal of the proposed project is to leverage technology to make cities more accessible and safer for people with disabilities and those who may need the extra assistance. A first step to be taken in this project towards this goal is the design and deployment of a community-wide wayfinding system called CityGuide in the city of Wichita that relies on a strategically deployed infrastructure of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless information emitters. CityGuide is proposed to be developed as a partnership between the City of Wichita, Wichita State University (WSU), an urban-serving, research university, and Envision, a local not-for-profit serving the blind and visually impaired. The objective of this project is to lay the foundation to meet the three long-term CityGuide needs: integrative and fundamental research contributions, research-capacity building, and community engagement. To this end, this project proposes activities to identify research priorities and set in motion a plan for realizing the CityGuide vision. Broader societal impacts from this project include (i) the development of wayfinding technologies for persons with special needs, and (ii) creation of tools for the general population that enable various geofencing applications. Broader educational impacts include (i) the offering of a multi-disciplinary graduate class with a focus on solving societal challenges posed by disabilities through mobile technologies, and (ii) the incorporation of aspects of accessibility in undergraduate student research. The envisioned CityGuide application proposes to (i) supplement outdoor GPS systems (in an integrated smartphone app) to provide fine-grained, customized, turn-by-turn navigation within or across indoor and outdoor spaces for those with visual or physical impairments, and those from the general population, (ii) complement existing signage and provide customized information about features of interest in the community. The multi-disciplinary team working on the project will collaborate on activities that lay the foundation for addressing the research question of how to design and deploy effective and usable wayfinding systems for those with special needs in our communities. Answering this question would make the following fundamental interdisciplinary research contributions along the way: (i) how can large-scale low-cost wireless embedded devices be deployed and configured in indoor and outdoor spaces for effective wayfinding?, (ii) how can (and what) information from these embedded devices in the environment be leveraged to simultaneously meet the varying special needs of citizens within the community?, and (iii) how can we build usable human-computer interfaces for wayfinding that can simultaneously meet the various human constraints posed by disabilities?